Dave Taylor (Source: AskDaveTaylor.com)

by Dave Taylor

It’s something that I hear from teens all the time, the refrain that “it’s cool, I can just delete it if it’s a problem” when we’re talking about online safety, privacy and the risk associated with everything that’s posted online. They assure me that those pictures on Facebook, the awkward photo from the party last Saturday night, the angry Tweet, none of them are permanent so it’s no big deal.

Unfortunately, they’re wrong.

There’s never really been any medium like the Internet, with its millions of Web sites and thousands of sharing and social services. It’s not an “information superhighway”, it’s not a “huge bulletin board”, and it’s not “just like text messaging dozens of your friends”. Because of that, most parents are lost when trying to wrap their heads around how things work: there is no perfectly apt metaphor.

That misunderstanding breeds misinformation and that’s exactly what today’s teens have heard from their peers and, very occasionally, from their parents, that digital mistakes can be fixed, that nothing has permanence because the Web is a dynamic, “fluid” environment. It is, but for it to work, it’s also far more permanent than people realize.

When you’re connected to a Web site, for example, odds are very good that most of what you’re seeing is coming from what’s called a caching server somewhere between the actual computer that hosts the site and your own system, a snapshot that’s maybe a few minutes, maybe a day or more old. It helps the Internet run faster.

(Credit: Dave Taylor)

There are also archival services like The Internet Wayback Machine  that take historical snapshots of as many sites as they can access for research purposes. Oh, and the Library of Congress , which receives regular archival copies of the entire public Twitter universe. Every. Single. Tweet.

And then there are search engines like Google  and Bing, which operate by making a copy of every single page that they index and scour for customers. The copy of the page that just matched your latest search could be days, weeks or even months old. Again, that helps the Web keep humming.

As should be clear, however, all of these get in the way of deletion really deleting things.<

Don’t believe me? Delete your Facebook account, wait a few months, then sign up again. Magically, your _deleted_ account will be restored. Why? Because Facebook doesn’t actually remove things, they just make them invisible to public search.

As a result, when I talk with teens, I drum into them the harsh truth, that the Internet has no delete key. Whatever you post, be it a photograph, a short video, a status update, a story or a tweet, make sure it’s something you want to live on for years and years into the future.

Dave Taylor is a single father to three, blogging about it at GoFatherhood, and a well-known technology writer who manages the popular AskDaveTaylor  tech Q&A site. You can find him everywhere online, but start on Twitter: @DaveTaylor

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A new study by the Pew Research Center has good and bad news for Facebook’s role as a teen destination.  The report, Teens, Social Media and Privacy, shows that Facebook’s popularity with teens has actualy grown by 1% since 2011 to a whopping 94% of all teen social media users. The next highest service is Twitter (26%) followed by Instagram, the photo-sharing mobile app that Facebook acquired last year. Tumblr, which was just acquired by Yahoo for $1.1 billion, came in 6th with 5% — actually below MySpace if you can believe that.

Source: Pew Internet Parent/Teen Privacy Survey, July 26-September 30, 2012

The bad news, according to the report, is that “Focus group discussions with teens show that they have waning enthusiasm for Facebook, disliking the increasing adult presence, people sharing excessively, and stressful drama.”  Still, “they keep using it because participation is an important part of overall teenage socializing.”  The authors went so far as to report a “sense of a social burden teens associated with Facebook,” adding, “it is sometimes seen as a utility and an obligation rather than an exciting new  platform that teens can claim as their own.” While the Pew Research fielded the survey, the focus groups were conducted by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The issue of adult presence on Facebook has come up in some of my conversations with teens.  In her blog post about the Pew survey, Anne Collier (who is my co-director at ConnectSafely.org) pointed out the futility of trying to keep abreast of everything your kids do online.  ”Trying to monitor teens’ activities by setting up an account in every online service and app they use in a kind of whack-a-mole approach to tech parenting won’t ultimately keep parents abreast of their kids’ digital activities for the simple reason that the more we monitor, the more likely they are to move on.”

Most teens are privacy savvy

The gist of the report focused on teen privacy and the good news for those worried about today’s youth is that kids are actually a lot smarter than many adults give them credit for.  The report does point out that “teens are sharing more information about themselves on social media sites than they did in the past,” but that 60% of teen Facebook users keep their profiles private, and “most report high levels of confidence in their ability to manage their settings.” Girls  are a lot more likely than boys to have a private (friends only) profile (70% vs. 50%).

It should come as no surprise that the vast majority of teens (91%) post photos of themselves while most post their school name and home town.   A slim majority (53%) post their email address and a fifth of the teens post their cell phone number.

Photo sharing and disclosing locality and school has become integral to the use of Facebook and experts no longer consider it particularly dangerous.

A study conducted by the Crimes Against Children Research Center “has shown that simply posting or sending some personal information online does not put youth at risk,” according to a Fact Sheet published by the Center.

Source: Pew Internet Parent/Teen Privacy Survey, July 26-September 30, 2012. n=802 teens ages 12-17

If you want to know more about teen privacy and safety

If I may take a point of personal privilege  ConnectSafely.org, the non-profit Internet safety organization where I serve as co-director, today published two new parents’ guides to Instagram and Snapchat. These free guides, along with our parents’ guides to Facebook and Google+ can be found here.  Our website has lots of tips on privacy, safety and reputation management  in social media.

Listen to a 10-minute interview with the study’s co-author Amanda Lenhart

To hear my 10-minute CBS News/CNET podcast with Amanda Lehnart, senior researcher at Pew Research Center and co-author of report,  scroll down to the bottom of this CNET post.

Disclosure: I serve as co-director of ConnectSafley.org, a non-profit Internet safety organization that receives some of its support from Facebook

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From Pew Internet Project’s May 2013 study, “Teens, Social Media and Privacy”

Pew turned up a lot of intelligence on teens’ part, where safety, privacy and reputation management are concerned, bearing out findings in Canada last fall. Here are some key findings of this important research, Pew’s first in-depth look at teens’ online privacy since 2007:

• “The frequency of teen social media usage may have reached a plateau” – the number of teens social media users who check their pages “‘several times a day’ hasn’t changed in any significant way since 2011,” Pew says.
• Teens’ Twitter use is up significantly, from 16% of US 12-to-17-year-olds in 2011 to nearly a quarter (24%) now, and African American teens use Twitter significantly more than white teens – 39% vs. 23%, respectively.
• “The typical (median) teen Facebook user has 300 friends, while the typical teen Twitter user has 79 followers” (and Pew found that teens “don’t always think of Twitter as a social networking site,” though the authors didn’t say what they do think Twitter is).
• Online mirrors offline: “Teens’ Facebook friendship networks largely mirror their offline networks” (which should further reduce the speculative “stranger danger” fears of the previous decade and its national task forces [see this]). “Unwanted contact from strangers is relatively uncommon, but 17% of online teens report some kind of contact that made them feel scared or uncomfortable,” Pew said, adding in a footnote, thought that its question did not reference sexual solicitations, so respondents could’ve been referring to a wide array of concerning behaviors or interactions.
• A whopping 70% of teen Facebook users say they’re friends with their parents on FB, and 91% of teen Facebook users are friends with members of their extended family.
• Their use of Facebook is “waning.”
• We knew this, but it’s important confirmation: “60% of teen Facebook users keep their profiles private [note that Pew's not just saying that 60% use privacy settings], and most report high levels of confidence in their ability to manage their settings.” On Twitter, thought, nearly two-thirds (64%) of teens tweet publicly, which is typical for adult Twitter users too.
• “Teens take other steps to shape their reputation, manage their networks, and mask information 
they don’t want others to know: 74% of teen social media users have deleted people from their 
network or friends list”; 58% “share inside jokes or cloak their messages in some way” (see this about “social steganography” from researcher danah boyd); 26% post false information like a fake name, age, or location to help protect their privacy (see this about “fictionalizing profiles” as a safety measure).
• Teens with larger friend networks on Facebook also use more social apps and services other than Facebook. They also share more information and media while at the same time show more care with “profile pruning” and reputation management.
• Teens’ concern about advertisers’ access to their information is low: “just 9% say they are ‘very’ concerned”; 40% are somewhat *or* very concerned, while 81% of parents are somewhat or very concerned about this for their children. Pew adds that “teens who are concerned about third-party access to their personal information are also more likely to engage in online reputation management.”

So let’s zoom in on the reasons teens interviewed in focus groups gave Pew for why they’re using Facebook less and consider some takeaways:

1. “The increase in adult presence”: The takeaway we might consider is that trying to monitor teens’ activities by setting up an account in every online service and app they use in a kind of whack-a-mole approach to tech parenting won’t ultimately keep parents abreast of their kids’ digital activities for the simple reason that the more we monitor, the more likely they are to move on. It’ll get harder and harder, too, because they aren’t moving on to a single new service (the way in the last decade Facebook replace MySpace as the No. 1 social network site). Today, digital socializing is expanding and diversifying because it’s now on the mobile platform at least as much as the Web. It looks like digital monitoring and “parental controls” are being replaced by good old-fashioned communication between parent and child about how they use digital devices and spaces (we ConnectSafely folk offer discussion points in two of those spaces with our new parents’ guides to Snapchat and Instagram).
2. “People sharing excessively”: Note how smart Pew’s respondents are to find that annoying! What this indicates is that protective social norms are developing – teens are viewing it less and less socially acceptable to overshare. Adults might find it comforting to see this; it’s online safety in action at the grassroots level. And I hope parents will increasingly understand and acknowledge the protective power of social norms among young people every bit as much as among adults.
3. “Stressful ‘drama’”: This is one reason why, in other reports, young people are saying they’re moving to Snapchat and other perishable media services: drama avoidance (see this). If the photos and videos vanish in 10 seconds or less, there’s no chance posturing (or “posing”), no self-presentation, “claiming,” or grandstanding. Drama can’t build. Sharing becomes just fun, spontaneous and, well, gone in a few seconds. What a relief, huh? Drama can’t build (or at least drama queens and kings have to work a lot harder), people can let down their guard a little (a little), and reputation management becomes a little less of an issue.

“One of the most striking themes that surfaced through the Berkman focus groups this spring,” the authors write (referring to their co-authors at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society), “was the sense of a social burden teens associated with Facebook. While Facebook is still deeply integrated in teens’ everyday lives, it is sometimes seen as a utility and an obligation rather than an exciting new platform that teens can claim as their own.” Thus their growing interest in the mobile platform. Facebook and its Instagram app are mobile, too, but so are hundreds of thousands of other apps offering at least thousands of different uses. Teens’ digital social activities, from the friendship-driven to the interest-driven kinds*, are diversifying and segmenting. That makes for fascinating conversations with our children and their peers. Seriously, there is so much to learn about them now in kinder, more respectful, less intrusive ways than through impersonal monitoring software and “parental controls.”

*For more on friendship- and interest-driven social networking, see the 2010 MIT Press book Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out (pdf).

Related links

• Social media researcher danah boyd on the Pew study, highlighting important findings on race distinctions and privacy practices (thanks to Tim Lordan of the Internet Education Foundation for pointing this out)
• “Young people’s own tactics for public-image management online”
• “Smart public-image management in social media”
• “Australian teen panelists on social media: Meaty insights”
• “Computer-based socializing likely to have peaked”
• Early insights on “How teens view ‘the drama’” in September 2011

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Palo Alto, CA, May 21, 2013 – ConnectSafely.org, a leading Internet safety nonprofit, today announced the publication of two new and timely parents’ guides to Instagram and Snapchat, answering the Top 5 questions parents have about these photo-sharing apps so popular with kids including:

• Why kids love these apps
• What the risks of each app are
• How to help kids stay safe using the apps
• How to report abuse and block problem users
• How to use privacy settings

Written by ConnectSafely.org co-directors Larry Magid and Anne Collier, A Parents’ Guide to Instagram and A Parents’ Guide to Snapchat cut through the sometimes scary media hype to provide parents with the clarity they need to talk with their kids about optimizing the apps for safety, privacy and reputation protection. They address the apps’ minimum age, how to manage a profile (in Instagram), and how Snapchat photos actually can last more than 10 seconds.

“It’s important for parents, educators and policy makers to understand how these apps work and how kids are using them,” said ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid. “Our main goal is to encourage parents to have a conversation with their kids about how they use these services,” said co-director Anne Collier.

The guides, which join ConnectSafely’s A Parents’ Guide to Facebook and A Parents’ Guide to Google+, are available at ConnectSafely.org/guides and feature illustrated instructions for using the apps and important pointers for parents on kids’ safety, privacy, and reputation protection.

ConnectSafely.org today also debuted its redesigned website, complete with new content, including downloadable and printable tips on subjects such as cyberbullying and sexting and the latest news and commentary on Internet safety and citizenship.

About ConnectSafely

ConnectSafely is a non-profit organization with resources for parents, teens, educators, advocates, policy makers – everyone engaged in and interested in the impact of the social Web. Find us at ConnectSafely.org, Twitter.com/ConnectSafely and Facebook.com/ConnectSafely.

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Never give out your password to anyone (except your parents). Never give it to friends, even if they’re really good friends. A friend can – accidentally, we hope – pass your password along to others or even become an ex-friend and abuse it.

Don’t just use one password. It’s possible that someone working at a site where you use that password could pass it on or use it to break into your accounts at other sites.

Create passwords that are easy to remember but hard for others to guess. When possible, use a phrase such as “I started 7th grade at Lincoln Middle School in 2004” and use the initial of each word like this: “Is7gaLMSi2004.”

Make the password at least 8 characters long. The longer the better. Longer passwords are harder for thieves to crack.

Include numbers, capital letters and symbols. Consider using a $ instead of an S or a 1 instead of an L, or including an & or % – but note that $1ngle is NOT a good password. Password thieves are onto this. But Mf$1avng (short for “My friend Sam is a very nice guy) is an excellent password.

Don’t use dictionary words:  If it’s in the dictionary, there is a chance someone will guess it. There’s even software that criminals use that can guess words used in dictionaries.

Don’t post it in plain site: This might seem obvious but studies have found that a lot of people post their password on their monitor with a sticky note. Bad idea.  If you must write it down, hide the note somewhere where no one can find it.

Consider using a password manager. Programs or Web services like RoboForm (Windows only) or Lastpass (Windows and Mac) let you create a different very strong password for each of your sites. But you only have to remember the one password to access the program or secure site that stores your passwords for you.

Don’t fall for “phishing” attacks. Be very careful before clicking on a link (even if it appears to be from a legitimate site) asking you to log in, change your password or provide any other personal information. It might be legit or it might be a “phishing” scam where the information you enter goes to a hacker. When in doubt, log on manually by typing what you know to be the site’s URL into your browser window.

Make sure your computer is secure. The best password in the world might not do you any good if someone is looking over your shoulder while you type or if you forget to log out on a cybercafe computer. Malicious software, including “keyboard loggers” that record all of your keystrokes, has been used to steal passwords and other information. To increase security, make sure you’re using up-to-date anti-malware software and that your operating system is up-to-date.

Consider a “password” for your phone too. Many phones can be locked so that the only way to use them is to type in a code, typically a string of numbers. Sometimes when people with bad intentions find unlocked phones, they use them to steal the owners’ information, make a lot of calls, or send texts that look like they’re coming from the owner. Someone posing as you could send texts that make it look like you’re bullying or harassing someone in your address book with inappropriate images or words.

If you’d like to print these tips out, here’s a PDF of these tips. Please contact us  for permission to reprint or post.

For more information:

* How to create and remember strong passwords
* Facing the pain of passwords (CNET News)
* Strong passwords: How to create and use them (Microsoft)

© 2010 ConnectSafely.org

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A Sameer “selfie” in Instagram (reminds me–I need to follow him!)

This is just one way parents can help kids make sure they’re in control of their technology use and not the other way around. “I know you want to gain more and more followers … but amassing more and more followers is a never-ending pursuit,” blogs my friend Sameer Hinduja, professor, researcher and co-founder of the Cyberbullying Research Center, who blogs about a lot of things besides cyberbullying (this post isn’t about that). “First you were so happy when you got a few likes to a picture you uploaded. Then you weren’t happy until you got double-digit likes. Now you want triple-digit likes. And multiple comments. And it kind of bums you out when it doesn’t happen. This is madness, and there is no end to this. It’s never going to be enough, and you are going to waste so much of your life this way.”

Good likes, superficial likes, creepy likes

Why is it such a waste? For one thing, Sameer adds, “people just quickly scroll through hundreds of pictures when they check their phone in moments of boredom (because they are, like you, often following hundreds of people), and just touch each one to like them. Liking a photo on Instagram is a quick, relatively thoughtless piece of interaction that often doesn’t mean much at all.” Of course it also depends on who does the liking, but usually it only marginally suggests actual interest in the photos and – if a young person’s putting a lot of “selfies” (self-portraits) on display – it could lead to the wrong kind of interest, at least as far as parents are concerned. But does the kid himself or herself really want to attract creepy interest? That might be something to stop and think out loud about together. Everybody likes a little attention sometimes, but not the kind that focuses purely on appearance, right? If the answer is yes, there are other things to talk about – see this. If the answer is, “that photo (or comment) isn’t about that, Dad/Mom,” then ask for the context, find out more, because there usually is context people outside the peer group don’t understand. [This kind of reflective communication about an activity is called experiential learning and practices the mindfulness that is protective in social settings online and offline.]

“Please do not get caught up in [leveling up with likes]. It seriously makes me sad when I see so many teens who do,” Sameer writes. “Your identity cannot be wrapped up in the number of times you are noticed, liked or validated in Instagram” or any social media service.

Gamification vs. what’s really rewarding

Ok, so here’s where “gamification” comes in (going a little deeper if parents and educators are interested): What Sameer is saying, basically, is that likes can’t ultimately satisfy us because they create the desire for MORE. They’re about addiction not satisfaction, being controlled not in control (as in games controlling players, not the other way around). This gets to the question people have about whether we or our technologies are in the driver’s seat. Likes, scores, +1′s, badges, etc. are external rewards. Syracuse University media professor Scott Nicholson, who’s been studying motivation and media, makes an important distinction between external (the academic term is “extrinsic”) rewards, the rewards of gamification, and the internal or intrinsic rewards of what he calls “meaningful gamification.” Meaningful is what ultimately satisfies and motivates (meaningful engagement is also a safety factor, as are agency and community – see the last bullet in Related links). Young people, parents, educators, and media companies need to be talking and thinking together more about intrinsic rewards – what constitutes meaningful participation.

Meaningful gamification, Nicholson says, is about agency or autonomy, mastery, and purpose (the words Daniel Pink uses too, in his best-selling book Drive; other words people use are “choice,” “relevance” and “meaningfulness”*). Parents can ask their kids (and themselves): Isn’t THAT what we really want – e.g., meaningful connections, real friendship more than likes, to be appreciated for who we are at least as much as what we look like? An intrinsic reward is very individual, but Pink describes it generally as something that delivers on “the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”

We see kids working toward that kind of reward all the time – working for causes they care about deeply. They seek it out in games too, sometimes because it’s easier to find “epic meaning,” as game designer Jane McGonigal, PhD, puts it, in game worlds than in classrooms and everyday life. What if it were easier to seek and pursue epic meaning in everyday life? How can parents, educators and media companies help with that? [I think social media, with its allowance of progressive engagement – hanging out, messing around, and geeking out – are making it possible for young people to explore for greater meaning in their lives (see the book of that title from MIT Press).]

Make way for agency, mastery, purpose

Certainly meaning doesn’t always have to be epic. There’s meaningfulness and learning in play, and playfulness is vital too, especially in digital media, which we learn as we go, by messing around with it. It’s just important not to be played – by people, media, or technology – regardless of our age, and for adults not to view youth merely as people who can be played, as potential victims or “game addicts.” Parents, kids, schools, social media companies can think together about how to focus at least as much on what supports autonomy or agency in youth (what empowers them as much as protects them) in programs that are relevant and meaningful to them – rather than just gamifying their lives, education, and digital media use. There’s something inherently disrespectful and unmotivating about believing or sending the message that the only way they’ll engage is if we gamify the experience. If we want kids to have control over their tech and media, we have to start giving them that control – treat them as active agents for their own good and that of their friends, families, communities (online and offline), talk with them about how that happens in their lives, and give them opportunities to define and pursue what’s meaningful to them.

Related links

• *A word about 21st-century learning (and preparing our kids for life): Daniel Pink says that, “for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery and purpose.” I say that’s the main upgrade education needs too – not gamification per se, or flipped classrooms, or any other single “solution,” but agency, competence and meaning/relevance/purpose for students. THIS is what prepares them for learning and working creatively in a rapidly changing environment. This is 21st-century learning.
• About ed tech: Of course none of the above is to say there shouldn’t be digital games or even extrinsic rewards in school! (Heck, grades are basically extrinsic rewards, though they’ve come to have a lot of meaning for some people.) It’s not either/or. It’s possible there’s an extrinsic-to-intrinsic spectrum, and what’s meaningful for some isn’t for others. And having digital games and environments in school can greatly increase student engagement and learning – we just all need to think about where digital learning tools and games like these fall in the intrinsic-to-extrinsic spectrum (in each context: in your classroom, our family, our school, at this point in time). Meaningful is individual, situational, and contextual.
• On obsessing about likes, some more perspective
• Nicholson in long form: The link I gave you above to a video by Prof. Scott Nicholson at Syracuse University is a little 9-min. introduction to the ideas. Here‘s a longer-form version (90 min.)
• “Challenging the idea that games can’t be fun AND meaningful”
• Example of meaningful gaming in school (to the students, their teacher, their parents and the school): “Mining Minecraft”: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, guest posts from teacher Marianne Malmstrom in New Jersey
• On Meaningful gamification and Internet safety

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Book is based on based on the true-life story of Alter Wiener, a teen survivor of five prison labor camps during WWII (illustration (c) 2013 by Craig Orback)

Children’s book author Trudy Ludwig, who specializes in books “that explore the colorful and sometimes confusing world of children’s social interactions,” is working on an extraordinary project that deserves widespread support.

She’s collaborating with illustrator Craig Orback on a 32-page picture book titled Gifts from the Enemy, based on the true-life story of Alter Wiener, a teen survivor of five prison labor camps during WWII and the author of From a Name to a Number. Wiener has authorized the project.

Ludwig has written several children’s books including My Secret Bully. Trouble Talk. Too Perfect and Confessions of a Former Bully. As you can tell from the titles, she has dedicated her considerable talents to helping raise resilient and caring children.

Ludwig and Orback are launching their project on Kickstarter because, “With big publishing house mergers and buyouts taking place right and left these days, we want to create a more hands-on publishing model that further supports collaborative efforts.”  And I have to admit I’m anxious to see how they do because I’m thinking of raising funds for my next book on Kickstarter after having written several books for major publishing houses.

Click here to view the Kickstarter campaign and pledge support for this worthy project and click below to see their video.

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And the squished-ness feeling is mutual, she points out, in a lot of ways. It isn’t just the embarrassing comments of parents when they forget children’s whole peer groups can see them, including peers who could use the embarrassing comments against their kids. The article’s even more about the TMI feeling parents get too – not just about their children’s peers, those sweet little kids they knew 10 years ago but also just typical teenage stuff that we never wanted our parents to see all the time when we were teens – stuff that’s completely normative as well as stuff that tempts parents over and over again to intervene, when there really are some things our children need to work out themselves so they can build resilience. It’s a delicate balance we’re being asked to strike, and it’s not easy to be on a tightrope all the time.

So when is too much information really a problem, you might ask? Well…

• When we find ourselves increasingly stressed out by what we see in this big “bay window” on our children’s lives
• When we let it suggest to us that problems are worse than they really are and we overreact (e.g., when we believe news reports that there’s a cyberbullying epidemic and there isn’t by any stretch of the imagination)
• When we let it suggest that young people, especially our own children, are worse than they really are (see the awful cover of Time’s May 20 issue – awful except for the last line “Why they’ll save us all,” which is probably much more predictive than the rest of it)
• When the tsunami of information decreases our respect and increases our fears for our children – and it’s the respect that encourages them more than anything to be the human beings they want to be.

Having said all that, the article might actually be TMI about TMI, since this is only the Facebook-on-the-Web phase – one that’s ending. We’re now moving to the mobile phase in which we’ll increasingly feel we don’t know enough (maybe this is some sort of cosmic correction for parental TMI!), where the good news is, we’ll have to keep the lines of face-to-face communication with our children wide-open.

Related links

• “Peering thoughtfully through this window into our kids’ lives”
• “Private vs. public parenting (& a new Pew study)”
• “It’s time to outgrow the ‘kids, these days’ cliché”
• “The meta-trend behind the teen (& everybody) mobile trend”
• “Study on long-neglected factor in Net safety: Resilience”
• “Parenting or (digital) public humiliation?”
• “Does tracking our kids’ every move make them safer?”

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National Center for Missing & Exploited Children grateful for recovery of 3 missing women

David Finkelhor

by Larry Magid

David Finkelhor, the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and a researcher for the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children, has written an incredibly useful article for the Washington Post, debunking 5 myths about missing children:

1. Most missing children have been abducted by strangers.

2. More and more children are going missing.

3. The Internet has made kidnapping easier.

4. Prevention lies in teaching children to avoid strangers.

5. The main goal should be to reunite children with their families.

Myth busting can save lives and avoid panic

Debunking myths is important because it helps make children safer. For example, panicking over stranger abduction – as horrific as that is — does nothing to help the vast majority of missing children who are missing for other reasons such as running away or being taken by a non-custodial parent. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t do all we can to prevent and find the one-hundredth of 1 percent of missing children who are “taken by strangers or slight acquaintances,” but we must also focus on all of the other children who are away from home for other reasons.

It’s also important to know that there is not an increase in the number of missing children cases or other crimes against both children and adults. Finkelhor points to FBI statistics “showing fewer missing persons of all ages — down 31 percent between 1997 and 2011.” He also wrote that “The numbers of homicides, sexual assaults and almost all other crimes against children have been dropping, too.”

Internet not increasing risk

And, as several studies have shown, the Internet does not increase a child’s risk of being abducted. If anything, argues Finkelhor, “it may have contributed to the decline in missing children,” because it has changed the way children take risks.  Socializing and experimenting online, said Finkelhor, is likely safer than “going to the unchaperoned open house or the keg party at the quarry.”

Most strangers are not “dangerous” but some acquaintances are

I’m very glad Finkelhor reminded people not to fall for the myth about “stranger danger.” While it is of course possible for a stranger to harm a child, the vast majority of children who are abducted, sexually molested or otherwise harmed by an adult are victimized by someone they know — often a family member or someone close to the family and sometimes by a trusted adult like a coach, clergy member or teacher. And strangers can be your friend. If a child is in trouble the best option is often to seek help from a stranger, perhaps a police officer but perhaps someone from the community.  Rather than fear strangers, Finkelhor says “We’d do much better to teach them the signs of people (strangers or not) who are behaving badly.”

For more about missing children check out this Key Facts page from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), including:

• More than 200,000 children were abducted by family members.
• More than 58,000 children were abducted by nonfamily members.
• An estimated 115 children were the victims of “stereotypical” kidnapping. These “stereotypical” kidnappings involved someone the child did not know or was an acquaintance. The child was held overnight, transported 50 miles or more, killed, ransomed or held with the intent to keep the child permanently.

If you have any information about a missing child call NCMEC at 800 THE LOST or visit the Cyber Tipline. You can also follow NCMEC on Twitter and visit NCMEC’s Facebook page.

Links:

Finkelhor’s Washington Post artitcle

Predator Panic Making a Comeback

Crimes Against Children Research Center

Net threat to minors less than feared

Disclosure: I’m a member of the board of directors of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children but do not speak on behalf of the organization

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