First Posted: 1/23/2015
Lima Senior and other schools in the area are having problems with confession pages online.
Now it’s time for our confession as parents in the community: Most of us didn’t even realize this was a problem.
Sure, we’ll acknowledge cyber-bullying is a problem. We’ll shake our fists and tell our children not to engage in it. We’ll talk about how every person is valuable, and we shouldn’t cut each other down to feel better about ourselves.
Do we even what our children are doing online?
The Lima schools acknowledged they’re dealing with a cruel Twitter trend of “confession pages,” a vicious online burn book full of students’ names and histories with drug use, sexual activity and personal attributes. While some go down, others pop up.
Just because you’re friends with your child on Facebook doesn’t mean you know what they’re doing online.
Many parents aren’t even on Twitter, much less actively monitoring what their children are doing on the platform devoted to messages of 140 characters and less. Even if you are, your child’s activities online might’ve headed over to Instagram, where harmless pictures can have scathing conversations beneath.
We haven’t even scratched the surface of their current options. There’s Snapchat, where the messages supposedly disappear after 10 seconds, unless someone captures a screen shot and distributes that. We haven’t mentioned Kik Messenger, Yik Yak or WhatApp, other messaging sites popular for people trying not to use standard text messages, which still are a popular way for teens to communicate.
The reality is there are too many options for parents to monitor all of them. That’s why it’s so important to know your child, not just the technology.
The Cyberbullying Research Center offers 10 tips to prevent cyberbullying, available online at http://j.mp/top10cyberbullyingtips. Most of them are more about the relationship with your child than their relationship with technology, such as educating your child about appropriate Internet behaviors or establishing that the rules of society online are the same as interacting with someone in real life.
Most of all, you should set the expectation that you’re going to monitor their online activities. If they have a new iPhone, make sure your fingerprint’s one of the ways onto the device. Make sure they know you’re going to look around at what they’ve been doing.
There are technological ways to covertly spy, but those just push children into more innovative ways to avoid your prying eyes. It’s best to cultivate an open, candid line of communication. The Cyberbullying Research Center even suggests an “Internet Use Contract” or “Cell Phone Use Contract,” where the teen agrees what’s responsible or irresponsible and agrees to follow whatever rules you’ve set in place.
Bullying certainly isn’t a new issue, but the Internet amplifies it so an entire school can hear in seconds what once took days to spread. It’s up to the adults in these situations to help our children make smarter choices and protect everyone in their schools.
