I was recently invited to be a guest blogger at uknowkids.com and I am honored, inspired, and grateful. Once I recognized the genius behind uknow.com and uknowkids.com, I immediately saw the urgency, importance, and inspiration of this powerful company to help kids. Knowledge is potential power but action is power.
A growing trend in the online world is cyberbullying. As a natural result of the wealth of social networks and technology-based communication platforms, cyberbullying has taken center stage for many children dealing with its effects. Catching this at an early stage is integral to protecting children from dangerous consequences.
Unfortunately, the news has demonstrated the darker side of online bullying. Much attention has been given to teen Amanda Todd, who committed suicide after being harassed by online bullies. Jon Ferry adds that a U.S. study found that cyberbullying victims are twice as likely to commit suicide as those that haven’t experienced this type of treatment. In Canada, it is being studied by the government and could attract its own law.
While some of these stories are extreme, they paint a picture of the potential severity of cyberbullying. And even in smaller doses, it is clear that cyberbullying can have a significant detriment to those that
If your child has a Facebook account, you've got to understand the privacy settings and parental helps Facebook already has in place. Knowing Facebook safety features means that you can teach your kids to manage their private information and stay safe online. Here are 9 things you need to know about Facebook for kids.
There are lots of ways to bully someone online, but social networks are the most effective and most devastating way to go about it. And Facebook, the most popular social network of all, is a prime favorite for cyberbullies. Does your child know what to do if bullied on Facebook?
93% of teens who have witnessed cruel behavior online say that most of the harassment took place on Facebook. If your tween or teen has a Facebook account, they should know these 4 things to do if they become a victim of Facebook bullying.
43% of kids say they've been bullied online and kids say that 93% of the cruel behavior they see online is on Facebook. Your child's first line of defense should be unfriending bullies or blocking them – but which is most appropriate, and what's the difference between the two?
Did you know that October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month? 2012 marks the ninth year that the National Cyber Security Alliance and the Department of Homeland Security have teamed up to educate the American public – and that includes your kids – about staying safe online. Here's what you can do.
Parental monitoring is no easy task, but parents realize that it's one of their most important responsibilities. My kids put themselves on a global stage every time they use the Internet, and it's up to me to ensure that they're doing it in a way that protects their safety and their reputation. But parental monitoring isn't what it used to be. The way our kids use the Internet keeps changing, so the way we keep tabs on their online activity must also evolve.
A decade or so ago, it was usually enough to place the family computer in a well-trafficked area of the house and install some parental controls on it. But today's kids don't even use the family computer as their main method of getting online. Kids use their phones, their tablets, their gaming systems, their music players, and other handheld devices. They may go all week without even touching the family computer.
Bullying is a really hot-button word, guaranteed to grab you (especially if you have kids of your own) by the collar and make you pay attention. I'll admit that headlines with the word “cyberbully” almost always catch my notice. Bullying both scares parents and mystifies them. Let's clear things up a little.
Parents – myself included – are apt to shrug off cyberbullying as just another iteration of the bullying you or I might have endured as kids. We turned out all right in spite of it, didn't we? But the truth is that cyberbullying is very different from anything we knew.
When you became a parent, nobody handed you an owners' manual. From health to education to socialization, raising chidren today is hard enough without the spectre of cyberbullying looming over your heads. The old days of classroom taunts and playground insults have exploded into the technical age, and today's children have a lot more to worry about.
This month Marco Viscomi, a 27-year-old college student from Canada, was indicted in federal court for using a computer virus to blackmail teenage sisters into producing child pornography – of themselves.
He struck up a conversation online with the 17-year-old and talked her into sending him some risqué photos, then downloading a file from him that turned out to be a virus. Then he told her that he would ruin her laptop and send the photos to her parents if she didn't make explicit videos with her 13-year-old sister.
In a world where cyberbullying is commonplace behavior and online rudeness is par for the course, here are 3 simple arguments for your teen to avoid being negative online and be more positive in his posts and texts.
1. Negativity Makes You A Target
On average, how much would you say your teen goes online? Checks their Facebook? Sends text messages? If you're like most parents, you greatly underestimate both the time and the intensity with which your teen is involved with the Internet and mobile devices. Parental monitoring is important, if for no other reason than to have an accurate picture of what your kids are doing online, and how much they're doing it.
When my children were small, I knew everything they did, every television show they watched, every friend they had. If they wanted a snack from the cupboard or a new toy from the store, they had to go through me. I was in complete control.
Maybe you don't know what a “dumb phone” is, but your teens certainly do – and they don't want one.
One of my closest girlfriends hasn't upgraded to a smart phone yet: her trusty old flip phone serves her just fine. She does find herself several times a day, however, constantly apologizing for her lack of connectivity.
If we're in a group and someone says, “quick, grab your phone and take a picture!” or “get on Facebook to show me some pictures of your new niece,” she has to shrug and say, “Sorry, I can't. I have a dumb phone.”
Most of us think of parental monitoring in terms of protecting your child from bullying and predators, or maybe just protecting them from posting an inappropriate picture on a whim that could haunt them for years. Of course it does all those things, but simply knowing where our kids are online can clue us in on what's going on in their life.
Just by checking the Internet history on my home computer I know what news stories my husband is interested in and what projects my kids are working on in school. Did you know that just looking at the sites your kids have visited in the last few days and weeks can also give you a pretty good picture of what their life looks like right now?
The media loves the phrase 'bullycide,' and the kids like Phoebe Prince who take their lives in the wake of cyberbullying are never far from the thoughts of parents. But are we doing our kids a disservice by stressing the link between cyberbullying and suicide.
When I picked up my friend's 10-year-old daughter Gabby for art class last spring, I asked her how her day had gone. “Good,” she said. “A guy came to our school and told us about his son, who killed himself because he was bullied.”
Out of every one hundred tweens and teens, how many do you think are cyberbullied? Twenty? Forty? Sixty? Actually, new research suggests that the actual figure may be much lower than we think.
A new presentation of the results of two studies to the American Psychological Association this week shows that only 15% of kids were actually cyberbullied. The two studies surveyed a total of 5,000 teens.
Most of you reading this will think this is an impossibly low figure. We hear about cyberbullying every single day. It is all over our schools and in the news. How can a 15% figure be realistic at all?
Tweet Tweet! It’s that time again…Twitter party time! We are happy to announce that our next party is this Thursday August 23 at 3PM EST. The entire hour is going to be dedicated to cyberbullying due to the number of Olympic athletes that were bullied in London. Our hosts @timwoda and @stevewoda will be offering helpful tips to parents to ensure child safety this year and are available to answer questions.
It's the end of August, and back to school time is approaching once again. Whether your kids are dreading waking up early to catch the school bus or chomping at the bit to get back, it's time to say goodbye to summer vacation. The new backpacks, new clothes, and new graphing calculators are already bought and waiting. Back to school time is exciting, and it's also a great time to have a refresher course with your teen about Internet safety.
SWAT-ting is a new trend that everyone is talking about. It also happens to be a nightmare for police departments around the nation. SWAT-ting is an attempt to fool an emergency service into dispatching an emergency response team. The callers use services like Spoofcard to disguise the origin of the prank call, change their voices and add background sound effects.
All parents know that the Internet is a place that requires parental involvement and parental monitoring. There are cyberbullies, online predators, and identity thieves out there to worry about.
But the obvious dangers notwithstanding, did you know that some Internet uses and behaviors may also be linked to a teen's physical and mental health, too? Many studies suggest a correlation between certain types of online behavior and physical or mental health problems, from anxiety to obesity.
