Conclusion
The good news is that most children and teens online are not behaving horribly, taking excessive risks, exposing private and personal details of their lives, and treating each other badly. For example, some organizations and Internet safety educators have been saying that 40% to 70% of children and teens using the Internet are suffering from cyberbullying. Though cyberbullying behavior is quite real and horrible when it happens, we believe the number of children and teens who are experiencing cyberbullying personally is actually closer to 20% in the population we sampled. Still, 20% is a significant number of children and teens, but not the epidemic number others are suggesting. That being said, many children and teens are taking unnecessary risks online and using websites that are not developmentally healthy or appropriate for them to use.
One of our biggest concerns overall is the number of younger children who are using Facebook and the attendent risks.* Also some children and teens do behave badly online, and their behavior can affect many others.
Throughout our fifteen years of talking to kids about their online activities, there have been two consistent axioms we can report:
1. Children will under-report online activities that they think adults would disapprove of. We have seen this periodically when we meet with the children we survey. For example, 40% of the seventh graders may tell us they are using Facebook but when we speak to them in person, without their teachers present, about 75 - 80% might then admit to having a Facebook account. This admission of having a Facebook account is a remarkably easy thing to verify so it is unlikely that they would raise their hand and risk being called a liar by their peers.
2. Whatever children are doing on the Internet today, they will be doing the same thing next year at a younger age. Using Facebook is a case in point. During the fall of 2007 we began to hear from a small number of 5th graders (10 years old on average) who said they had Facebook accounts. For the first time ever, fourth graders (9 years old on average) began to report to us that they had a Facebook or MySpace account in the fall of 2008. During the 2008 - 2009 academic year, our data showed that 10% of 6th graders had an account with an adult social networking site. This past year the percentage of 6th graders (11 years old on average) with Facebook accounts has climbed to 25%. A key issue that many adults don't always consider is that children are not developmentally ready to handle the risks and challenges that are associated with using adult social networking accounts.** And if parents do allow their children to have a Facebook account, we strongly recommend that parents have the password to that account until their teen is a junior in high school and routinely log into their child's account.
Though parental control software is no panacea for the risks children and teens face when using the Internet, parental control software provides parents with much greater controls and monitoring of their children. And this is still true even though one in every four children who have PAC software, report getting around it somehow. (The two most common methods used by teens to get around PAC is that they know a parent's password and use it to turn off the PAC software, or they use an anonymous proxy site that the PAC may not be blocking.) PAC software should always be one part of the strategy that parents use to keep their children safe online and using the Internet in developmentally healthy ways. Continual conversations about life online, and parents' expectations for their children's behavior are critically important strategies for parents to routinely employ. So, too, is an educational component! Schools must put in place a curriculum that addresses a wide variety of issues and content such as:
- How to respond to, report, or recognize cyberbullying and online harassment.
- How to decipher Internet addresses, make use of safety features on web browsers, and identify fraud and phishing.
- Why it is critically important to protect your privacy online and how to do so.
- How to create strong passwords (not just one) and why it is important never to share them with anyone except a parent.
- Why NOTHING is truly private online and examples of real-life consequences from those who have ignored this truism and suffered consequences as a result.
* "Why Facebook Has It Wrong About Our Kids", Published by ChildrenOnline.org and available at: www.childrenonline.org/articles/WhyFacebookHasItWrongAboutKids.pdf
** Ibid.