Mind the Gap!
So our Pastor at church has been preaching about responsibility a lot lately, and it has got me thinking about my responsibilities and taking them more seriously. Youth group especially. I am putting together a newsletter for the parents in our church about youth culture and how to find a mutual platform for conversation. From what I've seen, youth today are looking for authenticity and meaning. They want to belong, to make a difference, to be someone. They want relationships, they want to be heard and seen.
Take these desires and add to the mix the new online applications like MySpace, Facebook, and heck, even Blogger, you have a great tool as well as a great danger. These social networking sites are a great way to connect to your friends, make new friends, post pictures, and make your voice heard. It is a place to carve out a little space just for you on the internet. Teens are on MySpace like never before, and often unsupervised simply because their parents are unaware of the possible dangers. What kinds of dangers? It's just a nice place to talk to their friends, right? Think about this: What if the teen posts their phone number, posts a picture that has their home address in the background, their birthdate, full name. Any of this information is ripe for the picking by unscrupulous hands. I'm not saying that these sites are bad, but just like anything, they can be misused and should be monitored by parents.
So parents, what can you do? Google your kids. I'm serious. Put their name (first and last) in quotation marks and search for them on Google. It is amazing what can come up. For instance, I Google myself now and then, just to see what comes up. It's surprising. Typical things, like my website and my blog. In 2001 I signed an online endometriosis "quilt", that still shows up. I found that someone I don't know quoted my blog in their blog (certainly an odd feeling, and they took it totally out of context), and a message board from my 2004 astronomy class where I posted a couple times talking about theories of the age of the universe. Crazy stuff that I didn't even remember writing, let alone that it was still findable online.
So yes, parents; Google your kids, look at their MySpace page frequently, look at their friends MySpace pages, but above all, teach them safe online practices. Tell them to not give out revealing info, only post things that they would want their parents and (more often these days) their potential employer to see. More and more employers are Googling their applicants. You can tell a lot about a person by the online social networks they belong to. If your child belongs to the group "Another day in the drunk tank", then, yeah, you might want to have a conversation about alcohol.
Above all, parents need to educate themselves about the things their children spend the most time on. Is your child always on MySpace? Check it out. Facebook? Get comfortable with it. Flickr? Figure it out. Otherwise, your children will be on this wide, vast internet, talking to who knows what kind of people, posting tons of pictures, and putting themselves (and you) in all kinds of danger. Get with it, parents; it's only going to get worse if you don't start now.
Take these desires and add to the mix the new online applications like MySpace, Facebook, and heck, even Blogger, you have a great tool as well as a great danger. These social networking sites are a great way to connect to your friends, make new friends, post pictures, and make your voice heard. It is a place to carve out a little space just for you on the internet. Teens are on MySpace like never before, and often unsupervised simply because their parents are unaware of the possible dangers. What kinds of dangers? It's just a nice place to talk to their friends, right? Think about this: What if the teen posts their phone number, posts a picture that has their home address in the background, their birthdate, full name. Any of this information is ripe for the picking by unscrupulous hands. I'm not saying that these sites are bad, but just like anything, they can be misused and should be monitored by parents.
So parents, what can you do? Google your kids. I'm serious. Put their name (first and last) in quotation marks and search for them on Google. It is amazing what can come up. For instance, I Google myself now and then, just to see what comes up. It's surprising. Typical things, like my website and my blog. In 2001 I signed an online endometriosis "quilt", that still shows up. I found that someone I don't know quoted my blog in their blog (certainly an odd feeling, and they took it totally out of context), and a message board from my 2004 astronomy class where I posted a couple times talking about theories of the age of the universe. Crazy stuff that I didn't even remember writing, let alone that it was still findable online.
So yes, parents; Google your kids, look at their MySpace page frequently, look at their friends MySpace pages, but above all, teach them safe online practices. Tell them to not give out revealing info, only post things that they would want their parents and (more often these days) their potential employer to see. More and more employers are Googling their applicants. You can tell a lot about a person by the online social networks they belong to. If your child belongs to the group "Another day in the drunk tank", then, yeah, you might want to have a conversation about alcohol.
Above all, parents need to educate themselves about the things their children spend the most time on. Is your child always on MySpace? Check it out. Facebook? Get comfortable with it. Flickr? Figure it out. Otherwise, your children will be on this wide, vast internet, talking to who knows what kind of people, posting tons of pictures, and putting themselves (and you) in all kinds of danger. Get with it, parents; it's only going to get worse if you don't start now.
posted by Laura Francabandera at
9:12 PM
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