Online activity: Its Like the Air They Breathe

Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Yoursphere, Friendster, Black Planet, hi5.  These are just a handful of the available social-networking sites on the internet today.  And with the growing list of mobile devices coupled with wireless 3G/4G internet connection, access to these sites is anything but inconvenient. According to an article in The New York Times written by Tamar Lewin, “Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago […]”.  As a mother of five, I know that kids don’t normally devote half that time to studying.

It goes without saying that most kids nowadays have both a cell phone and a laptop/PC that they have access to on a daily basis, most of the time right in their pocket or backpack.  And it also goes without saying that the Internet can be extremely useful in an educational manner, but it can also eventually interfere with traditional studying habits.

According to the article in the NY Times, Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician from the Children’s Hospital Boston, said that “it’s time to stop arguing over whether [social media] is good or bad and to accept it as part of a child’s environment, like the air they breathe […]”.  Though the doctor is right, social media is an important part of our children’s lives and becoming more and more so, let us not forget that too much of anything is bad for you.  Media moderation, combined with physical activity, is very important for children.

In several blogs and interviews, I have advocated that parental oversight and moderation is a great way to be involved in our children’s everyday-online world.  This can be very difficult given the rapid evolution of today’s technology.  To keep up, parents need to know what kind of technology is out there, both hardware and software.

For example, if your child owns an iPhone or iTouch (which many do these days), but you, the parent, know nothing about the iPhone’s functions and capabilities; you essentially have no idea what your child is doing on that phone and how often they’re doing it.  It suffices to say that the iPhone is basically a handheld computer with all the capabilities of a regular cell phone, which means they have total access to all the content (good and bad) on the internet in the palm of their hand.  Keep in mind that other smartphone devices such as Blackberrys, Sidekicks, Google’s G1, and the newer Nexus One all have very similar, if not the same, capabilities.

Don't be intimitated by these, ask questions!

In order to stay “in the know”, parents need to continually dialogue with their kids, require an “open phone” policy, and depending on the child, utilize the parental controls available to us.  Ask your child how to use their smartphone device; ask them what they use the device for (other than texting and phone calls) and keep track of their usage via your phone bill.

Set limits:  If they are going over their minutes or texts, change your plan to limited texting/minutes.  Set limits as to how long they can be on the computer, with the exception of homework/research for school.  Maybe designate a time when mobile devices or TV aren’t allowed to be on at all, i.e. dinner time.   We have a “no texting at the dinner table policy”, “or no texting while talking to one another.” While we tried the:  ‘Cell phones downstairs at 10:00 every night’, this was added stress for my husband and I. We’d have to get up out of bed to see if indeed the phones made it down stairs. Then when they didn’t, we had to go talk to our kids; and we even found that after the phones were placed downstairs at 10, the next morning they were gone.

Suffice to say, setting limits just got easier when we decided to skip the stress and just utilize the “Smart Limits” AT&T provided us. A one-time visit to our account, allows the device to be turned off automatically at the specified period of time. No more arguing or negotiating.

Physical oversight, without invading their privacy, also comes in handy when checking your children’s technological habits.  Keeping track of how long they’ve been on the computer or how often they’re texting their friends in a single day can help you in moderating their usage and seeing whether or not their habits are slowly morphing into a serious problem.

Overall, we as parents need to remember that the convenience of Internet access, social networking sites, and other types of social media can act as both an obstacle and an aid in our children’s lives.  For example, many classes are starting to use social networking as a means of creating a virtual environment for their students to meet and share information with each other.  This is an example of how technology can be a great tool in your child’s education; however, this can also make it more difficult for parents to distinguish the difference between the internet being used as an educational tool or as a socializing tool—hence my emphasis on effective communication between parents and their children while leveraging the tools that exist to help keep our kids lives balanced. 

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