The
culture we live in today encourages everyone to post on social networking sites
and tweet where they are and what they did all day. It can be great to know
what your friends are doing to pleasantly surprise them by showing up at a
sports event they are attending. But on the reverse side, having someone you
don’t know show up at an event is not a pleasant surprise but a horrible
situation. No wonder why so many online predators have a field day with all the
information they can gather from social networking sites. Online predators know
they can be whoever they want to be on a social networking site. They study
what young girls and boys like and what the newest trend is, in other words,
online predators do their homework on children.
If
online predators are doing their homework to friend our children, don’t you
think as parents we owe it to them to do our homework on the latest digital
trend, game or technology?
The
majority of the social networking sites require children to be at least 13 and
these sites have policies stating the age requirement, but it is really up to
the parents to keep children under 13 off these sites. As well as, parents need
to make such their children are not sharing too much personal information on
social networking sites and setting the privacy level to the highest.
As
a parent it is okay to be a pest sometimes (meaning you are involved in their
activities), especially if it is for the safety of your children. Knowing what
activities your children like to do online and remembering it can change every
week or sometime every few days. Children hear about a new game or website from
their friends and they will want to check it out, if they haven’t done so at
their friend’s house or school. So being a pesky parent is okay if you want to
stay in the know of how many friends they have on a social networking site and
they actually are friends with them in real life. This is just part of doing
parent’s homework.
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