Mom Central Technology

Facebook, sexting, and keeping kids safe online with Yahoo!

My friend, Marcy, recently found out that her 12-year-old daughter had a Facebook account (now deleted) even though she was expressly forbidden to have one. Marcy found out by checking her daughter’s email account when the filters on her home computers blocked access to Gmail. (She was helping her daughter get permission to use Gmail on the family laptop, and saw the emails coming in from Facebook.) Now Marcy is looking into programs that will email reports of her daughter’s online activity while she’s at work.

We’ve all heard about “sexting” in the news, the hysteria around it and what kids think about it, too. This leads me to wonder what parents are doing to teach their kids how to be safe – and smart – online. Do you tell your older kids not to put questionable pictures of themselves on Facebook? Have you friended your kids online to monitor them and their friends? (I have several friends who do this.)

What are you telling your children about online safety? At what age should you start the discussion? What rules are you putting in place to protect your children? 

Here at Mom Central Technology, we try to let you know about the latest programs to monitor your children’s online behavior from PGKey to Safe Eyes Mobile. Another cyber safety resource is Yahoo!

Here are Yahoo!’s top 10 links for keeping your child safe online:

1. Yahoo! Safely - a complete resource for all things cyber correct.

2. Create a family pledge for Online Safety.

3. Applying a filter to your child’s Yahoo! Mail account is simple by creating a family account to monitor your child’s use of Yahoo! and edit and maintain their account settings.

4. Yahoo! Mail uses the latest technology to combat spam and to help protect you from phishing and viruses. Yahoo!’s spam guard will filter out 97% of all things bad, so your child won’t accidentally click on something.

5. You can flag photos on Flickr for abuse via the “Report Abuse” link that’s available in the footer of every page.

6. Four things to know before your child goes online: info.yahoo.com/safely/us/yahoo.

7. Report abuse on any Yahoo! property at abuse.yahoo.com.

8. Keep private things private. Manage your online profile.

9. Yahoo!'s SafeSearch feature is designed to filter out explicit, adult-oriented content from Yahoo! Search results.

10. Keep up to date with our safety experts blogs.

Face-to-Face with Facebook

By Sharon Cindrich

A while back I had the opportunitie to present a workshop on Internet safety to a small town in Vermont whose parents were concerned, like many, about allowing their children to participate in social networking sites, like MySpace and Facebook. So, instead of just talking about these sites, the nuances and pitfalls and safety features, we learned about social networking in the best possible way. We created our own.

Arrangements to use the computer lab were made so that approximately a dozen parents could venture online, and together I walked these digital immigrants through the Facebook sign up process, pointing out security features, answering questions about privacy and demonstrating how this easy it was to connect with others in town...and out. One parent even discovered her daughter’s profile - one she did not know was on the site.

We visited other sites too, and I was able to show parents how to search for their child’s MySpace, point out the Parent Care center and use some of the amazing, family-friendly resources and tools available online to teach kids solid tech skills and connect with their interests and activities.

Hours later, back at my bead and breakfast, it was long past midnight before I finally stopping fiddling around with my own Facebook profile and messaging a friend that I ended up on a video chat with. I should have gotten to bed earlier, but I’m chalking it up to research.

It is easy to understand why kids can’t get enough. Especially easy when you’re there yourself - when you see it, and touch it, and fiddle around with your own privacy settings. It’s easy to understand why kids want to post photos when you try to decide which picture you would post on your own profile and end up spending way too long in front of the screen mesmerized and addicted to a conversation.

It’s easier to understand - and then monitor and manage and have a conversation about - when you’ve tried it out for yourself. Understand?

Sharon Miller Cindrich is an author, columnist and mother of two tech-savvy kids. Her work has appeared in magazines and newspapers across the country including The Chicago Tribune, Parents Magazine and FamilyFun Magazine, where she is a contributing editor. Her self-syndicated column Plugged In Parent is published in parenting magazines around the country, and her book E-parenting: Keeping Up With Your Tech-Savvy Kids (Random House 2007) is available on Amazon.com.