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Psychologist says teens need cyber boundaries
Sunday, January 13, 2002 By L.A. Johnson, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Parents, if you don't know what your teen-agers are doing online, you'd better ask them.
If you don't have the type of relationship with your child where you can ask, you should try to cultivate one.
About 17 million teens -- 73 percent of all children age 12 to 17 -- use the Internet, according to "Teenage Life Online," a Pew Internet & American Life Project study released in June.
The Internet reflects the world in which we live -- the good and the bad. From the relative safety of a computer, anyone can easily and immediately gain access to interesting and educational places, as well as society's seamy and prurient underbelly.
"Most kids are using most of the tools and toys that they have sensibly," said Robert Kraut, a Carnegie Mellon University social psychologist who studies human-computer interaction. "The computer is one they can get infatuated with. It's highly engaging and it combines an interactivity and a kind of social nature."
Most teen-agers know more about the Internet than their parents and they use it much more extensively than adults. They also are much more likely to engage in real-time online communication through instant messages or chat rooms, Kraut said.
About 74 percent of online teens -- 13 million -- have used instant messaging programs, which enable people to hold conversations with others instantaneously, the Pew study showed.
"Like many people using the Internet, interpersonal communication is a major reason [teens] go online, and on average they're using instant messaging to talk to kids from school.
"But unlike adults," he added, "they're more likely to be using the Internet to meet new people. They can try out new ways of acting, a new persona, without, in general, that having consequences in their real life."
And if they don't like the instant message or chat room conversation, they can leave that area and return as a second, different character under a different screen name.
The Pew study said 56 percent of online teens had more than one e-mail address or screen name, and that 24 percent of teens who have used instant messages or e-mail or have talked in chat rooms have pretended to be a different person when they were communicating online.
There also are other forms of deception. Fifteen percent of the online teens and 25 percent of older boys say they've lied about their ages to gain access to a site, often one with pornography.
And 24 percent of online teens have created their own Web pages -- sites that often contain personal information and pictures of themselves.
There are several ways of finding out what your child is doing online, but the most straightforward is simply to ask.
"Often, having a computer in a public place in the house helps because it means just in the process of passing by, you get to see interesting things happening on the screen and can talk to your kids about it," Kraut said.
If you want to know whether your child has a Web page, plug his or her name into any one of the popular online search engines, such as www.google.com, and see if anything turns up.
"If you want to be sneakier," he said, most Web browsers leave traces on the computer of what sites a user has visited.
For example, the Internet Explorer Web browser creates a "history" of Web sites that have been visited and anyone with access to the computer can look at that history.
Kraut is critical, however, of the computer "filters" that have been developed to block children from seeing certain kinds of Web sites.
With these "not especially effective pieces of software," he said, "Lots of Web sites you don't want the kid to see can get through, and other legitimate ones are blocked."
Some instant messaging programs enable you to keep a log of conversations, but it's also very easy for the person using them to turn that off, Kraut said.
Because youngsters know more about what's occurring online than parents, parents should get the children to tutor them.
Keeping a child out of harm's way on the Internet has as much to do with a parent's ability to talk openly with a child as it does with how computer savvy a parent is.
"The technology itself and the way most kids are using it seem perfectly sensible," Kraut reiterated. "But just the same way that a kid might watch too much TV or spend too much time reading and not going out and getting any exercise, parents have a responsibility to keep some bounds."
For more information on Internet safety tips, see these Web sites:
The FBI's Parent Guide to Internet Safety: www.fbi.gov/publications/pguide/pguidee.htm
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Internet safety guidelines:www.missingkids.com/cybertip. Click on "Internet-related Child Exploitation."
Federal Trade Commission Internet Safety Guide: www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/online/sitesee/index.html
The Pew Internet & American Life Project "Teenage Life Online" study: http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=36
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