News/Commentary

By Cheree Cleghorn, Editor

Parents always have been advised not to read adolescent girls’ diaries (or listen in on their telephone calls)—those are violations of privacy.

Enter e-mail. Tricky. Looks like private mail. Looks a little like a diary. Private mail or a diary, however, can’t be sent with the click of the button, “Forward.” Parents snooping on their kids computers still has been seen as a violation of the privacy line.

Does privacy even exist any more? Yes, it exists, in part, still in consent. Parents can’t know whether their child was writing a truly private message to one friend. Parents can know that when their kids create their MySpace page, they intend to tell the world their news—-whatever that is.

This is the Way-Too-Much-Information-Generation.

When an adult, working on a personal computer, gets to MySpace and starts searching, they can’t find out….what? They find out everything whether they even wondered about it or not.

Parents should know what the whole world is being told by or about their teenagers for their own protection.

Parents need to talk to their kids about the kinds of sexual predators who use all kinds of Internet sites to spot potential targets. This is not scare talk. If a parent wouldn’t consider an action safe in the “real” world, then it isn’t safe in the MySpace world, either, but, for some reason, these kids just don’t get that. This is the milk carton generation, too. “Have You Seen This Child?” If that hasn’t helped them connect the dots, then parents need to do the dot-connecting for them.

Kids this age don’t have enough life experience to understand how this information can be used by predators in their private lives.

Author Laura Sessions Stepp has written that adolescent girls, who are hooking up, can have a past before they even understand what a past is. When their judgment develops, there it all is, staring at them in their more mature mirrors.

Add to that moment, their sudden understanding that their own past is posted on the Internet forever, and ever and ever.

A very few teenagers may be becoming faintly aware that future college admissions committees or employers will look simply because some kids know someone who lost an internship because of their MySpace content.

Social networking is too new for there to be a “group intelligence” about what’s safe and what’s not, given that in a very few years, they will want to get accepted by…..some institution for schooling or work.

It is not likely that MySpace content will be accepted as a college application essay in this century—or, at least, not until 2050, when today’s 15-year-old My Spacer could be a college president at 46.

If you care about a teenager, make it your mission to go on to My Space and see what’s up in her or his life and their friends’ lives.

Predators are checking. Schools are. Colleges are super-savvy about this. Internship directors are. Employers are.

Welcome to OurSpace, kids.

It isn’t always a friendly or safe place to be but it is where adults have to go sooner or later.

For you, later will be here much sooner that you can imagine.

Medpage Today

“Teenagers freely post personal information about sex, substance abuse, and violence on social networking sites, researchers reported here.(Emphasis added)

“More than half of MySpace profiles contained references to these health risk behaviors, Megan A. Moreno, M.D., of the University of Washington, and colleagues reported in the January 2009 issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. (Emphasis added)

“Teens have been increasingly drawn to online communities. About 90% report having Internet access and most report daily Internet use, the researchers said.

“But no large-scale studies have evaluated teens’ portrayals of health risk behaviors on these sites.”

Source: Medpage Today, January 5, 2009

Citation Source: Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, January, 2009.