How do I Raise Happy and Successful Goal Setting Kids?

INTERNET SAFETY FOR KIDS - CHAT ROOM EXPERIMENT

Posing as a 13-year-old girl, we googled for teen chat rooms and visited the one that came out top of the search engine. Every room we entered on that site, we were receiving lewd comments within seconds of going in.

To see what would happen, we responded to someone calling himself “OlderManForYoungF”. He told us that he was Brian, 45, from New York. Once he had us in a private chat room he bombarded us with sex talk and asked if we would like to see him touch himself. He also asked us to email him a photograph, and suggested talking on the phone several times.

Needless to say, we came away from that experience rather shell-shocked. This man was propositioning what he thought was a 13-year-old child! Now at that age children are inevitably curious about sex and liable to ask questions. And they would typically pose themselves as older than they are, by at least a couple of years, making them even more likely to be the recipients of inappropriate advances.

A recent Media Awareness Network survey of 5,200 students in grades four through 11 reported that of the 90 percent of Canadian children who have access to a computer in their home, 60 percent often disguise their own identity on the web and fully 79 percent have online acquaintances they’ve never met face to face.

What are the real risks our children run when using the Internet? Here are some to consider:

1. Exposure to undesirable sexual content. It is all too easy for our kids to stumble across indecent and perverted porn sites, many of which have content much more extreme than you would see in some adult magazines.

2. Unwanted sexual attention. In some ways this could be viewed as worse than pornography, because this is directed at the child. The lewd comments we got during our chat room experiment were pretty unpleasant. They can make children feel upset, introduce them too early to words and ideas about sexual perversions and also confuse them about what is appropriate or not when it comes to sexual matters.

3. Undesirable relationships. As some chat room are moderated by adults, it seems likely that people looking to have sex talk with children online will target a youngster and then try to develop the relationship over Instant Messaging (using MSN or similar software). Once the child trusts the predator sufficiently to give out his or her MSN address, the unscrupulous adult has carte blanche to talk dirty one-on-one with the child. If parents are not doing detailed monitoring of their child’s online activity, the conversations are private.

The good news is that there is a lot that we can do as parents to combat these threats. We have compiled a Quick Start guide for parents that is available for free download on our website, http://www.kidsgoals.com/kid-internet-safety.shtml. Also, you will find a transcript of the actual conversation between the 45 year old and what he thought was a thirteen-year-old child at http://www.kidsgoals.com/internet-kid-transcript.shtml - once again we warn you, it is not for children.

Wishing your kids safety on the Internet at all times!

By Cassie

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