Justin Patchin

Without a doubt, parents have a duty to do their part to ensure that their kids do not bully others.  They need to regularly remind their kids about the importance of treating others the way they would want to be treated.  They should talk about how some things we might do or say to someone that seem funny at the time are actually pretty hurtful.  When it comes to preventing cyberbullying, parents need to regularly check in on the online behaviors of their kids.  Problematic behaviors need to be addressed with reasonable and appropriate discipline.  In general, parents need to instill in their children an ethic that includes respecting others and always acting and interacting with integrity, whether online or off.  And they can do that in a caring and authoritative manner that encourages emotional connectedness yet demands respect and accountability. Indeed, research has shown a positive parent-child relationship makes it less likely that youth will engage in bullying behaviors as they do not want to risk damaging the valued bond.

But if parents fail to take these steps and their child bullies others, should the parents be held criminally responsible?

Local laws

An ordinance approved last month by the Monona, Wisconsin, Common Council allows parents of children who bully to be fined $114.  The city appears to be the first in the country to pass such a measure.  The Council also amended its ordinances to incorporate existing state criminal statutes that prohibit disorderly conduct, unlawful use of a telephone or computerized communication systems, and harassment.  All of this sends a clear message to citizens that harassment in all of its forms is not welcome within the city limits.

Last fall I wrote about a growing movement among municipalities to criminalize cyberbullying locally by enacting ordinances.  As occurred in Monona, many times city ordinances simply mirror existing state laws. As I wrote back then, there are a few reasons where this move might make sense. It allows a city attorney to pursue charges against an individual even when the county-level district attorney is unwilling.  It also allows for the cases to be handled in a municipal court (which Monona does have–many cities do not), rather than the state circuit court system.  This has the added effect (for better or worse) of shielding violators from the public shame of being eternally listed on Wisconsin’s Consolidated Court Automation Program website (CCAP) for all to see.

Parental liability laws hold parents accountable, and financially liable, for the behavior of their children when it is deemed that the parents were negligent in their obligation to provide proper parental care and supervision. In theory, these laws make a lot of sense: the idea is to compel parents to make sure their kids aren’t behaving in a reckless or delinquent manner. School lawstates that educators can be held liable for damages when they are found to have been deliberately indifferent to harassment that happens at schools. Maybe it makes sense to hold parents to the same standard.  Parents who are not adequately “parenting” ought to be punished right along with their kids, right?  Well, in practice it is much more complicated than that.

States have long had various laws on the books that can be used to hold adults responsible for the actions of youth (for a detailed history, see this article).  In 1903, Colorado was the first state to make it a crime to “contribute to the delinquency of a minor.” California law generally requires parents to “exercise reasonable care, supervision, protection, and control over their children.”  Parents who fail in this mandate could be found guilty of a misdemeanor and sentenced to jail. Massachusetts law states that “a parent is under a duty to exercise reasonable care to prevent his minor child from inflicting injury, intentionally or negligently, on others.”  In fact, some have suggested that parental responsibility laws can be traced back to 1646 when Massachusetts enacted its Stubborn Child Law which noted that parents can be fined if their child is caught stealing.  Of course the same lawalso proclaimed that “stubborn and rebellious” sons who do not obey their parents “shall be put to death.”

A number of years ago I was involved in evaluating a truancy reduction initiative in three elementary schools in Michigan.  One element of the program was to hold parents accountable if their elementary-aged children did not attend school.  For students younger than 12 whose parents did not cooperate with school officials, a warrant was sought for parental prosecution under the state’s compulsory attendance law.  The key phrase here was that the parents were uncooperative.  Only 3 parents out of the nearly 300 families involved in the program fell into this category.  Most were just looking for help to address a relatively simple problem that contributed to the absenteeism, like providing an alarm clock or transportation to school.

Most parents want to do the right thing

I think the same can be said when it comes to bullying. Most often when parents learn about the bullying behaviors of their children they will take the necessary steps to ensure that such behaviors do not continue.  In some cases they just don’t know what to do and with a little guidance they will be fine. (For recommendations on how to respond to cyberbullying, see our suggestions.)  In very rare cases, a few parents simply do not recognize the bullying behavior of their children as hurtful, or worse they may even encourage it.  Or parents completely ignore what their kids are doing online, even after being made aware of problems. Presumably, these are the types of parents that parental responsibility laws are directed toward.

One problem I see with this approach is that it is also likely to have a result that is opposite of that which was intended.  We know that the quality of the parent-child relationship is integral in preventing a whole host of inappropriate behaviors.  The concern is that threatening to punish a parent for the behavior of the child may serve to further weaken this relationship.  Parent and child are pitted against one another when the child misbehaves: “Because of what you did I have to pay $114!”  Furthermore, anyone who has a child of their own or who has worked with youth in a professional capacity (I fall in both camps) knows that even the best-intentioned guardian can run into an obstinate child who refuses to follow any instructions.  It would be inappropriate to hold parents responsible in situations where it is clear that the parent is doing everything they can to try to remedy the behavior.  These laws are really intended to handle the opposite – when parents are doing very little to respond.  And again, I feel like this happens very rarely.

Research needed

Unfortunately there has not been any evaluation research done to assess the effectiveness of parental liability statutes so we really do not know what kind of effect they will have.  Dr. Eve Brank, who is a professor of law and psychology at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, has studied parental responsibility laws in depth and told me “it’s impossible to speak about whether they are a good tool or not. We know that parents certainly play an important role in raising their children, but we do not know the effect of imposing legal sanctions on them when their children are involved in illegal behavior.” Indeed, in the project I referred to earlier that targeted elementary absenteeism in Michigan, we were unable to follow the students long enough to determine if the threat of parental prosecution actually resulted in better attendance.  So we simply just don’t know if holding parents criminally or financially responsible for the behavior of their kids will result in reduced bullying.

Critics have argued that this is simply another way to limit free speech and that the parents of outspoken youth will be punished for the protected speech of their kids.  If a child speaks up about his or her moral objections to homosexuality, for example, it could be construed as bullying and therefore could invoke punishment for the child and now the parent as well.  Even though the Monona ordinance clearly states that it does not apply to any “constitutionally protected activity or speech,” there is admittedly ambiguity when it comes to defining an incident as bullying, especially when it involves contentious subjects.  As adults (parents and others), it is our responsibility to teach teens to disagree, and even debate, in a civil manner.  So if you disagree with my thoughts here, feel free to sound off.  But please keep it respectful–your kids could be watching!

Dr. Justin Patchin is co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center and an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Criminal Justice from Michigan State University and his B.S. in Sociology with an emphasis in Criminal Justice from the University of Wisconsin-Superior. 

The post Holding Parents Responsible for Their Child’s Bullying appeared first on ConnectSafely.

“As I looked into using Pinterest as an educator tool,” writes educator Lisa Nielsen, “I found that most people I asked were using it more as a consumption or curation tool.” Curation is great – that’s an important way to learn media literacy (basically, figuring out what’s viable and useful, based on one’s interests and goals) – but, as we learn from the research in Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out, there’s a great deal to be learned in producing social media as well. It’s a progression that many users go through, as the title of the book suggests, from casual interaction to the trial and error of “messing around” with interests, ideas, and media to serious “geeking out” – developing a professional-level proficiency in or with media, in any craft, art, science, or profession. [Of course Pinterest is only one example of the many social media tools that can be used for curating and producing as well as consuming and socializing, including Twitter and Tumblr and mobile apps such as Intagram and Vine.]

Lisa likes that Pinterest, known as a social-scrapbooking tool (see this) can be used on any device. She lists five ways it can be used for education-related producing and sharing, though these seem geared for school-wide more than classroom use, but certainly classes can post everybody’s science fair project and teachers and students can post visual, annotated book lists. Teachers, students, parents, and grandparents can come up with lots more creative ways to use Pinterest for learning.

Related links

• From last fall, Pinterest-use data in “Fresh freeze frame of Pinterest”
• A year ago: “Is Pinterest an interest at your house?”

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“When people bend to pressure to exclude others, they also pay a steep personal cost. Their distress is different from the person excluded, but no less intense,” said Richard Ryan, psychology professor and co-author of “Hurting You Hurts Me Too: The Psychological Costs of Complying With Ostracism.” The study found that the distress comes from feelings of “shame and guilt, along with a diminished sense of autonomy,” said Nicole Legate, lead author, because “we are social animals at heart. We typically are empathetic and avoid harming others unless we feel threatened” (which says something about bullies too).

But even observing social cruelty exacts a psychological price, an earlier study at Brunel University in the UK found. “Bystanders are significantly affected by the bullying they witness or hear about, so much so that they may be at an increased risk of self-harming behavior,” wrote Prof. Ian Rivers. “The single most significant predictor of suicide risk among bystanders was found to be powerlessness [emphasis his].” He and colleagues also found “higher rates of absenteeism and substance abuse, along with depression and anxiety among school pupils who had witnessed bullying.”

All of which points to the importance of agency and community as well as empathy: empowering all school community members, especially students, with the understanding that each one is key to the well-being of each other as well as the community as a whole. The authors of the University of Rochester study wrote that their findings suggest “that the psychological costs of rejecting others is linked primarily to the thwarting of autonomy and relatedness.” How important it is, then…

• Not to represent young people as potential victims, as has typically been done in bullying-prevention and Internet-safety messaging.
• To give them and all involved the tools to be active contributors to their community’s well-being – social literacy tools (see “Related links”).

The powerlessness Dr. Rivers’s work turned up in bystanders points to those needs too. It’s what is mitigated by the agency of what scholars and game designers refer to in self-determination theory, which says “people across cultures have basic human needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness and meeting these hard-wired needs leads to greater happiness and psychological growth,” according to the University of Rochester researchers. Interesting: I’m seeing more and more points of intersection between social literacy, safety, school, and good game design (see the links just below).

Related links

• “What Net safety can learn from digital game design”
• “What does ‘safe’ really look like in a digital age?”
• “Less bullying fear at school: Fresh federal data”
• Ed Dunkelblau, founder and director of the Institute for Emotionally Intelligent Learning, tells schools that social literacy training isn’t adding to their plate, it IS the plate – see “Invaluable social literacy lessons from an anti-bullying conference.”
• “More signs that what works offline works online too”
• “Wisdom about bullying from a former target”
• “Social literacy up, social problems down in Chicago schools”

The post Hurting others hurts us: Study appeared first on ConnectSafely.

Based on my more than 15 years as a NCMEC board member*, I am quite sure that the actual images will not be viewable to individuals other than those who work for law enforcement, NCMEC and other agencies authorized and required to view such images as part of an investigation.

The search giant said that it’s committing $5 million towards the fight against child porn which includes creating a $2 million Child Protection Technology Fund to encourage the development of additional tools to fight child porn along with contributions to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in the United States and the Internet Watch Foundation in the UK. NCMEC will receive $1 million for use in the United States.

Some things shouldn’t be shared or found

In a blog post, Jacquelline Fuller, Director, Google Giving said that her company is ”in the business of making information widely available, but there’s certain “information” that should never be created or found.”  She said “We can do a lot to ensure it’s not available online—and that when people try to share this disgusting content they are caught and prosecuted.”

Google is one of several tech companies lending a hand in the fight against child pornography. Microsoft has developed “photo DNA,” that can help match newly uncovered images to other images even if they have been slightly modified (prior to photo-DNA even a single pixel change could prevent a match).  The  technology is being used on Facebook to identify any child porn that might be posted on the service which is not only removed but turned over to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children which brings in law enforcement when content is found to be illegal.

UK Gov’t adviser John Carr congratulated Google

Praise from child protection groups

In an interview, John Carr, an Internet safety advisor to the UK government said, “Finally the question of child pornography on the Internet is gaining some real traction and Google, with its huge investment, is to be congratulated for helping to bring that about.” He said that he hopes this will “lead to fewer images being available and fewer offenders.” Last month Carr publicly called on Google to take action after two child murderers were convicted in the UK who both reportedly used Google to look for child pornography and information about harming children.

“Once again, Google continues to demonstrate its commitment to combat the distribution of online child pornography,” said John Ryan, CEO, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.  “ For those child victims featured in these horrific images, Google’s cutting-edge technology will assist in minimizing their continued re-victimization.  We value our long-standing partnership with Google in our mutual efforts to protect children.”

Images of children being abused

Child pornography, also known as “child abuse images” is a general term that refers to images or videos of children big sexually abused or engaged in lewd sexual behavior. It is against the law in the United Stats and many other countries.  The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC’s) Cybertipline received 17.3 million images and videos of suspected child abuse in 2011 which is four times more than what their Exploited Children’s Division (ECD) saw in 2007.  These are images of real children being victimized not only when the images are captured but every time they are distributed and viewed. What’s more, the images, according to NCMEC are sometimes used “to coerce, entice or manipulate other children into performing sexually abusive and exploitive acts.”

* Disclosure: I serve (without compensation) on the board of  directors of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and also serve as co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a non-profit Internet safety organization that receives financial support from Google, Facebook and other Internet companies.

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New report from Center on Media and Human Development at Northwestern University

A survey of 2,300 parents of children between birth and eight years of age found that “Parents do not report having many family conflicts or concerns about their children’s media use with 78% disagreeing with the statement, “negotiating media use causes conflicts in our home.”  Twenty percent agree with that statement.

The study also found that parents “do not report significant conflicts with their spouses over their children’s media use.”  More than eight in ten (83%) married parents say they usually agree with each other about tech use, while 16% do not.

Negotiating media doesn’t cause conflict in most homes.

These findings are from a report from the Center on Media and Human Development at Northwestern University, titled Parenting in the Digital Age: A National Survey by Ellen Wartella, Vicky Rideout, Alexis Lauricella and Sabrina Connell.

Most parents not concerned

While 56% of parents say they are not concerned about their children’s use of media, only about a third say they are very: (13%) or somewhat (17%) concerned.

The study found that, even though many parents are equipped with smartphones (70%) and tablets (42%), “the vast majority of parents (70%) “do not think the devices make parenting  easier, compared to 29% who say they do.” Thirty eight percent of parents who own both a smartphone and a tablet say the devices do make parenting easier.

Among parents of 0–8 year-olds, percent who agree/
disagree that “smartphones and tablet devices make all 
parenting easier”

Putting media use concern into perspective

The researchers asked parents to rate various concerns they have about their children and, when it come to media use, only 31% said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned.  Media use came in sixth place behind Health and safety (45%), fitness and nutrition (41%), social and emotional skills (39%), school performance (33%) and literacy skills (32%). I might add that media use actually impacts several of those other concerns.

Interactive tech not being used to babysit

The study also found that while parents do use technology to manage daily life “books, toys, and other activities are used more often.” And most parents aren’t using technology as an electronic baby sitter. “Parents say they are more likely to use books, toys, and other activities when they need to keep children occupied than they are to use TV; and they are much more likely to use TV than to use mobile media devices.”

And when it comes to young children, it’s common for parents and children to use technology together.  Nearly a third of parents say that when their child is watching TV (32%), using the computer (29%), or playing on a smartphone (29%), the parent is watching or playing along with them “all or most” of the time.

Parents do worry about the impact of technology on their kids physical activity. Sixty-one percent of parents say video games have mainly a negative effect on physical activity compared to 58% who say that about TV, 57% about computers and 54% about mobile devices.

Positive about media use

Parents were more positive than negative about the affect of media on their children’s academic skills. On reading skills, 38% were positive about TV compared to 25% who were negative. Computers fared better with 59% positive and only 9% negative. Parents were less enthusiastic about mobile devices (37% positive and 21% negative) while video games came in at 21% positive and 35% negative.

Source: Parenting in the Digital Age: A National Survey

My take

My interpretation of this survey is summed up by the title of this post.  For the most part, parents are “alright” about how their young children are using media. Personally I think that’s real progress. Over the past few years we’ve had a steady diet of moral panics from media, politicians and some scholars over the “dangers” of too much media.  The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended zero screen time for children under two and less than two hours a day for older kids and, in its policy, lumps “TV and other media use” into a single category as if the actual activity or program doesn’t matter. While it’s hard to quarrel with the AAP’s conclusion that “children need positive interaction with other children and adults,” that doesn’t necessarily mean that they can’t benefit from use of electronic media as well.  From the looks of this survey, it appears that parents are being smart and understanding that — in moderation — watching appropriate TV shows and interacting with apps and devices can be a positive part of early childhood activity.

For more about this study, see my ConnectSafetly.org co-director’s post, Parenting the littlest media users: Important study

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What does concern those parents is the impact of lots of screen time on kids’ health – “the negative impact screen time has on kids’ physical activity levels. More than 60% said video games result in less movement by their children, with similar proportions saying the same about TV, computers and mobile devices,” US News reports. The authors themselves wrote that parents “are more likely to find a positive than negative effect of media and technology on many of their children’s academic skills.”

Family media use very individual

But it’s so individual from family to family, both the report and author, professor and tech parenting expert Lynn Schofield Clark indicate. Dr. Clark, who attended the release event in Washington, had an important take-away: “We don’t all experience media in the same way.” For some families in some neighborhoods, for example, staying inside playing video games might be safer than playing outside.

In her post about the report in PsychologyToday.com, she points to what I think of as an ideal approach to parenting where media’s concerned: “an ethic of respectful connectedness,” Clark calls it. “To the extent that media can help parents and family members to stay connected and to remain respectful of who they are and where they’ve come from, media can be seen as useful and helpful in relation to family goals.”

Less is better? It depends

So far in the digital age, our society tends to believe less media is better, but “not all parents can engage in the kind of concerted cultivation activities hat tend to make media use lighter,” Clark writes. Families “may face economic, health, language, or job- or transportation-related challenges…. ‘Helicopter parenting’ and concerted cultivation are rooted in the idea that young people can achieve and improve their lives through participation in existing societal structures, whether that’s school, sports or the arts. But while families facing greater economic challenges hope that these things will help, they don’t trust that they will [emphases hers]. They look to their families, neighborhoods, friends and communities to help their children develop the resilience they will need to face the challenges of racism, prejudice, and structural inequalities.”

Clark cites the view of Prof. Vikki Katz at Rutgers University, “who has studied Latino immigrant parents and their children” and said at the conference that “it’s important not to pathologize families who have economic struggles. They have the same goals as the rest of us when it comes to wanting the best for their children and in their hopes for the ‘American dream,’ and those of us working in areas of policy, research, and industry need to seek to provide support for them on their own terms.”

Some other interesting findings

• Tablets not babysitters: I’ve often heard it said that, when parents are busy, they just hand kids a smartphone or tablet. Not true. This study shows that they’re “more apt to turn to toys or activities (88%), books (79%) or TV (78%). Of parents with smartphones or iPads, only 37% reported being somewhat or very likely to turn to those devices.”
• Early media independence: Lots of parents use media with young children, the authors report, “but this ‘joint media engagement’ drops off markedly for children who are six or older.”
• Parenting no easier. These parents use digital devices a whole lot, but most (70%) “don’t think they’ve made parenting any easier.”
• Socio-economic differences: Families with incomes of $25,000 or less are more likely than families with incomes of $100,000 or more “to turn to TV for educational purposes” – 54% vs. 31%, respectively. It may have something to do with language, I think, that the researchers found that “lower income parents are also more likely to think TV has a ‘very’ positive effect on children’s reading (23%, compared to 4% among the higher-income group) as well as their math and speaking skills.” The authors add that “similar differences are found in parents’ views about the positives and negatives of computers as well,” which makes me wonder if “computers” means the Internet.
• Media time management. Professor Clark recommends that, instead of asking how much screen time is too much, parents might “think about teaching time management” so they can learn develop their own self-regulatory skills. And Prof. Barbara Fiese at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, encourages “healthy habits in the whole ‘family ecology’” of which media is just one part, Clark reports.

The Northwestern researchers divvied the various kinds of media environments that parents have created for their families into three buckets based on quantity of screen time: the 39% of households that are “media-centric” (11+ hours of screen time/day, with children spending 4-5 hours a day on-screen); the 45% that are “media-moderate” (spending just under 5 hours on-screen/day, with children spending just under 3 hours); and the16% that are “media-light” (generally with higher levels of income and education and spending even lower amounts of time with screen media, with children spending under 1.5 hours/day on-screen).

What does all this say about parenting these days? To Lynn Clark, it suggests that “parents will have to prepare children for a world that requires intentional effort as we seek to maintain the bonds that matter most to us.” I’m with her on that and, if I can riff on it a little bit: Successful participation in social media (not to mention school, work and all social spaces in our kids’ futures) is conscious participation. It’s both social literacy and media literacy – a “respectful connectedness,” as Lynn put it, online and offline. It doesn’t only defeat bullying and other anti-social behavior, it develops the kind of protection that’s preventive and permanent – with our children all the time and all their lives – critical thinking and resilience. And we know from the research that it increases academic as well as social success.

[The authors of "Parenting in the Age of Digital Technology" are Ellen Wartella, PhD, Vicky Rideout, MA, Alexis R. Lauricella, PhD, and Sabrina L. Connell, MA. Dr. Lynn Schofield is author of The Parent App: Understanding Families in the Digital Age.]

Related links

• Digital disadvantage: The UCLA Newsroom headlined its press release about this study “Trouble in Paradise,” but its real title is “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors,” and it’s the first book by researchers at UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of [American] Families.” It’s only a little about media, but co-author Elinor Ochs presented at the Northwestern conference too. Lynn Schofield Clark reports in her blog post about it that “Ochs showed poignant photos of backyards that sat empty as families retreated to separate indoor (and often mediated) activities in the scarce hours at home. In their study, she and her colleagues found that fully half of parents’ leisure time was spent with the television; most families had three TVs; 80% had TV in the parents’ bedroom; and 47% had a TV in the child’s bedroom.” If there’s an opposite to this, it might be what Lynn describes above: not less technology but more “respectful connectedness.”
• More links to Lynn’s work: “From ‘flipped classrooms’ to flipped households” and “Parenting or (digital) public humiliation”
• “Of fearless parenting in this unmapped landscape”
• “Peering thoughtfully through this window into our kids’ lives”

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Facebook announced that it is allowing users to create and click on hashtags, “similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest.” A hashtag, which is simply a word preceded by a pound or hash symbol (#) is a way to participate in a public discussion about a topic and allow others to click on or search for the hashtag to find your content. Google+ also hashtags.

Access depends on privacy settings

As with all posts on Facebook, someone’s ability to see what you post (even if you add a hashtag) depends on the who you’ve agreed to share the post with.  So, if you share a post only with friends, then only they will see it If you wish it to be seen by anyone you should click on the little icon below the post and select Public.

Hashtags are clickable and searchable.  I tested it by searching for #NSA and, as I expected, I immediately found posts from friends and even strangers (who had posted to the public) about Natonal Security Agency surveillance tactics.

According to Facebook you can now:

• Search for a specific hashtag from your search bar. For example, #NBAFinals.
• Click on hashtags that originate on other services, such as Instagram.
• Compose posts directly from the hashtag feed and search results.

(Source: Facebook)

Implications for sharing

Although this is a little change, it has big implications because, with hashtags, Facebook pages can become part of broader conversations.  While it’s certainly possible to use hashtags mainly to share stories among your friends, they encourage users to share more broadly as is customary on Twitter (where the vast majority of users post to the public). One difference between Facebook and Twitter is that Facebook allows you to determine the audience for each post each time you post so it’s pretty easy to have some posts shared with the public and others shared only with friends or friends of friends.

More coming

In the blog post, Facebook said “we will be rolling out a series of features that surface some of the interesting discussions people are having about public events, people, and topics.” So, stay turned for more features designed to encourage public and private conversations around topics.

Disclosure: Larry Magid is co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a non-profit Internet safety organization that receives financial support from Facebook and other companies.

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On the one hand: “Parents assess video games more negatively than television, computers, and mobile devices. More parents rate video games as having a negative effect on children’s reading, math, speaking skills, attention span, creativity, social skills, behavior, physical activity, and sleep than any other medium,” write the authors of “Parenting in the Digital Age” at Northwestern (stay tuned for more of their findings).

On the other hand: When asked by the Toronto Globe & Mail about teens’ video game play, Kathy Sanford, author of the Canadian study said:

“What we found [after following a group of 13-to-17-year-old videogamers for five years] was that what they were learning was a whole lot deeper and more profound than we had imagined, or that you can see from watching them. They are doing a lot of problem solving and strategizing. They are learning collaboration and leadership skills. But the most profound thing that got me really thinking about their civic engagement is that they are actively making ethical and moral decisions all the time. They are trying out roles through the characters in the stories. If they act badly, if they choose to be evil, they see the significant results of each of the decisions they make.”

I’ll shortly be blogging about both studies more, but I found this contrast interesting, and I hope parents concerned about frequent media reports about videogames’ negative effects might find some comfort – or at least some talking points for further discussion – in Dr. Sanford’s findings, because she also told the Globe & Mail that “educators and parents need to learn about this world if they hope to connect with kids who are comfortable moving in an alternative landscape.”

Related links

• “Why kids love videogames & what parents can do about it”
• “What Net safety can learn from digital game design”
• “Power of play: A mom & son in World of Warcraft”
• “Unboxing learning”
• “Challenging the idea that games can’t be fun *and* meaningful”
• “The whitewater-kayaking kind of learning needed today”

The post Point & counterpoint on young video gamers: 2 studies appeared first on ConnectSafely.

Sharon – who wrote a wonderful series of guest posts here in NetFamilyNews as Undercover Mom in Club Penguin, Stardoll.com, Poptropica, and BarbieGirls.com in 2009 – is as thoughtful as ever about kids in mobile apps. Don’t miss her thorough investigation into Instagram for Scholastic Parent & Child magazine, with three main points called “lessons” that a lot of parents suspect but would probably like to hear more on (she also offers four brief safety “rules” for underage Instagram use which make a lot of sense). What I love about Sharon’s approach is the balance that parents deserve: She provides both the upsides and the downsides, and she’s not out to scare anybody. That’s real child and parent advocacy.

Some how-to’s from our own Instagram guide

Our own Parents’ Guide to Instagram at ConnectSafely.org has a little more detail on what to do if stuff comes up. Sharon mentions hearing from a 9-year-old named “Hannah” that her “first follower was this weird old man” (that would be only one kind of “stranger” any user with a public account could encounter, many also being friends of friends of peers). Sharon asked her what she did, and Hannah said she “deleted him” but he “came back two days later.” In a situation like that, we tell parents in our guide, you can…

“Block someone if necessary. If someone’s harassing you, such as repeatedly tagging you in photos you don’t like, you can block them so they can’t tag you or mention you in comments. They also won’t be able to see your profile or search for your account. To block a user, go to his or her profile and select the Menu button on the top right side, then select ‘Block User.’ (Android users, go to the profile and tap the three small squares, then select ‘Block User.’)”

Relieved but conflicted

We also tell parents how people can untag themselves, manage their profiles, think about privacy, and be a good friend in the app. And we have some closing thoughts about parenting on the mobile platform at the end (page 6 of our short-and-to-the-point guide).

As for Sharon’s undercover experience (the first time I’ve known her to go in cognito in an app), sensible as always, she – probably like most of us – “was left relieved … but also conflicted. The democratic platform of social media means that the ability to censor material or share it on an age-appropriate basis
is nearly impossible.” I appreciated her wisdom in concluding that, though it’s tempting to say no altogether to social media, “as our children grow, our ability to control their interaction with technology shrinks. The best we can do, as parents, is be there, strapped in beside our kids, making the journey down this uncharted digital road together.”

Related links

• “Help with mobile apps kids love” and ConnectSafely’s parents guides to Instagram, Snapchat and other social media
• “Why not a gazillion likes: Getting wise to gamification in social media & life”
• “Kids, Instagram & its new ‘Photos of You’ feature”
• My introduction to Sharon’s undercover work back in February 2009: “Introducing Undercover Mom: Avatar anthropology”

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So that said, give yourself 23-and-a-half minutes to watch this profound, deeply loving talk about (non-tech) parenting by Andrew Solomon. It was posted this past week and has already been viewed, as of this writing, 249,520 times. Of particular interest to me in the context of social literacy and identity exploration by young people online and offline was what he says about self-acceptance, family acceptance, and social acceptance.

Solomon’s talking about what he learned during the years of research for his latest book, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity. It’s about parents raising exceptional, in some cases exceptionally challenged, children. Toward the end of the years of interviews and research he put into it, he decided he wanted to start a family, Solomon says in the talk. So people would ask him, “How can you have children when you’re studying everything that could go wrong?” His answer was, “I’m not studying everything that could go wrong. What I’m studying is how much love there can be even when everything appears to be going wrong.”

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