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Cyber Space, a Safe Place?
4 Steps to Preteen Safety
By Sue Marquette Poremba
Victoria Nash* knew her niece had a blog on MySpace.com. Curious, Nash decided to check out the site. "I found out her full name and the city where she lived," Nash says. "I was able to track down all her info ... where she worked and went to school. I e-mailed my concerns to both my niece and my sister, and they corrected the problems together."
Online communities can be a lot of fun. They give kids a place to express their creativity – many young people post their poetry, short stories, music clips and art work on their site – and a place to connect friends and other kids from around the world.
Too often, however, young people get on the Internet with few instructions and little supervision. Part of the reason is kids are more computer savvy than many parents. While parents may have heard of instant messaging or blogs, relatively few have used these interactive applications. "Parents need to be more savvy about computers," says Diana Delp, family therapist. "If we think we're smarter than our kids, we're wrong."
If they aren't smarter, they are sneakier. Preteens will try to outsmart their parents and the system. MySpace and Xanga, the two most popular online communities for young people, have minimum age requirements: age 13 for Xanga and age 14 for MySpace. However, there is no way (as of yet) for these sites to verify the age of a member, so not only are kids younger than the minimum age signing up, an alarming number of kids give an age older than 18 to ensure they have access to the entire site. Even when parents believe they are carefully monitoring their child's site, the child will find ways around it, often by setting up a second site that is accessed at a location other than the child's main computer.