Teen and kids safety alert: Alexis Summers, age 17, was killed in a fatal car crash as she texted at the wheel while driving early in November. What makes her death particularly poignant is the fact that she died only 8 hours after her home state of Pennsylvania passed a bill to make texting while driving illegal.
On the way home from visiting her boyfriend, Alexis's car left the road, hit a tree, spun around, and collided with the tree a second time. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Highlighting kids safety laws surrounding texting and driving:
When a state makes it illegal to text while driving, most of us breathe a sigh of relief that the roads are going to be that much safer from now on. But research actually suggests that this may be the opposite of reality, especially for teen drivers.
Maybe it's just the parent in me, but when I hear the words “social networking” and “kids” in the same sentence I get a little tense worrying about my kids safety. There are so many things we need to worry about when our kids start using Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter: cyberbullies, online predators, sexting, loss of privacy – the list goes on. But don't forget that social networks can be a great way for our tweens and teens to get involved in good causes, spend their time productively, and do their own small part to make the world a better place.
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In cyberspace, things rarely stay private. A nude picture, snarky comment, or reference to illegal drugs or underage drinking meant for a friend’s eyes only can easily be seen by a teacher, employer, parent, stranger, or the entire high school.
In an effort to underline the need for more caution in posting information online, the non-profit Ad Council has produced a series of public service announcements with the tagline “If you wouldn’t wear it, don’t share it.”
Like most families today, our family sees the Internet is an indispensable part of life as we know it. Letters written laboriously with a pen or pencil? Looking up phone numbers in a 3-inch thick Yellow Pages? Opening up a bound encyclopedia for information? Honestly, I couldn’t imagine going a day without the Internet.
Even with all its charm and convenience, I have to say that seeing my oldest child reach the age where she’s starting to get online makes me more than a little apprehensive.
As a parent, I try to shield her from things that could be dangerous for her, and right now I have complete control over what comes into my home. But when she starts using the Internet, I know that there are lots of sexually explicit or violent images that she could potentially be exposed to.
The boundary between kids and online pornography is dangerously transparent. And it doesn’t just affect kids who are actively seeking out graphic material online. According to the Crimes Against Children Research Center, 25% of children have had unwanted exposure to sexual pictures in the last year.
Kids with their own email accounts, particularly free ones like Hotmail and Yahoo, inevitably get lots of spam ads for penis enlargement and “lonely girls who want to chat with you” delivered right to their inboxes.
Or they could be doing their homework and be exposed to graphic images online by accident. Try it yourself – type a female celebrity’s name into Google and click the “images” link on the upper righthand corner. The odds are pretty good that at least one suggestive or inappropriate image will come up – or more, depending on the celebrity. And Google images does not censor its pictures. Full-frontal nudity and graphic acts show up in image searches, regardless of the age of the child at the computer screen.
To compound the problem, Internet pornography is often much worse than the magazines kids a few decades ago might have passed around at school. Ernie Allen, CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, explains that online porn “is not your father’s pornography. It is graphic, it is explicit, it is deviant. It is aberrant. Kids are seeing content that no 12 or 13 year old is mentally, psychologically, or emotionally prepared to deal with.”
If you’re like me, at this point you’re wondering if just shutting off the Internet altogether isn’t such a crazy idea, after all. But it’s not feasible in the long run, and it’s failing to address the real problem. Even if kids aren’t exposed to online pornography in your own home, they could accidentally see it in a friend’s house or even at the computers in the school library. Teach them how to react when it happens: close the browser window and tell you that they’ve seen an explicit image online.
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Around 50% of teens admit to texting while driving, and that’s a really scary thought for parents who have a new driver in the house.
Teens are already the riskiest class of drivers. They are inexperienced, exhibit slower reaction times, and often aren’t paying attention to much other than the car in front of them. Teens also think they are invincible, not imagining that unsafe behavior can hurt them or someone else.
At the top of the homepage is a screenshot of a shirtless man and a busty woman in a bikini top embracing in waist-deep water and staring into each other’s eyes with the phrase “Create your fantasy” underneath.
The website is called IMVU, a realistic Sims-like game and social networking virtual world purported to be for kids ages 13 and up.
IMVU players select an avatar and buy clothing and items to personalize its world. The avatars have adult bodies (not 13-year-old ones,) and virtually all of the female avatars are sexy and large-chested with suggestive outfits to match.
Now that most kids carry their video-enabled cell phones around everywhere with them, everybody is a cameraman. This can be a good thing – we’ve all heard stories about a thief who was caught because a bystander just happened to catch the robbery on his cell phone. But it can also be a source for trouble when fight videos start getting posted online.
Clips of two teens punching, kicking, and pulling each others' hair are surprisingly easy to find online, most of them posted by other kids who stood by and recorded the fight on their cell phones.
Do yo
u know how much texting and social networking your teen is doing? You may want to sit up and play closer attention to how your child communicates online – not just looking for “red flags,” but at the overall amount of time they spend doing it.
Researchers from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine found that excessive texters and social networkers were more likely to drink, do drugs, and be sexually active.
According to the study, teens who sent more than 120 texts per school day were:
