Posted on 06/19/2005 1:06:04 PM PDT by Crackingham
When Ashlee Fukushi's friends started blogging this school year, the 14-year-old Woodbury girl decided she wanted a Web diary, too, so she could keep up with the daily gossip.
"I had thought about having a pen-and-paper journal but was too lazy to do it," Ashlee said. "I thought it would be fun to go to my friends' sites and comment on their day and stuff."
But the whole idea of blogging makes her mother, Mindy Fukushi, a bit nervous. She found her daughter's site by accident one day on her computer and began reading some of Ashlee's posts — mostly entries about how school was and what she did that day.
"At this age, I know she needs her privacy," Mindy Fukushi said. "But this is totally new to me. I don't know how I should react."
The discovery led to a discussion and new rules about blogging for Ashlee, who is among a growing number of teens and preteens logging on to Web journals and social-networking sites to catch up with their friends and make weekend plans.
Experts say kids are comfortable with technology to an unprecedented extent, so turning to the Web for social interaction is a natural move — as foreign as it may be to their parents.
But some teens use cyberspace to bully or threaten classmates, as allegedly happened last month when two eighth-graders from Lake Elmo's Oak-Land Junior High created an online "hit list" directed at a dozen peers. And other teen users innocently post information that could put them at risk to predators.
Experts say many parents, even the most involved, know little to nothing about the technology their children are using or what they're writing.
"This issue seems to be getting worse and worse," said Nancy Willard, director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use in Eugene, Ore. "Kids are using blogs that are damaging other kids and damaging themselves. And a significant amount of parents don't know what their kids are doing online."
I don't know why anyone would want to put every detail of his personal life on the web.
One of the great benefits to parents of teens having their own web sites or blogs is that the teens, being naturally talkative and mistakenly thinking that blogs and websites are as private as diaries, are likely to disclose thoughts and ideas they would never mention to their parents. To get this valuable window into their kids' heads, all the parents need to do is log on. This why parents need to be very careful before they criticize their kids about the content of the kids' blogs--it will cut off this valuable source of information for the parents just as fast as disclosing the Ultra secret would have cut off the Brits' intelligence about Germany in WWII.
Check out http://www.myspace.com
Unbelievable what's on that site. Lots of kids use it as their blog, and their parent's would die if they knew what was being posted.
How do I know about it...I'm a nosey parent, LOL.
I don't know why anyone would want to put every detail of his personal life on the web.
**
You must not be familiar with the adolescent stage of egotism.
Good points
I can see your point on that, but, it also puts that information out for the entire world to see.
I don't either. That's because we're not teenagers. My 17-year-old daughter does it, too, and so do all her friends, of various ages. But my kid, who works extremely hard at a job, is on the honor roll at a good high school, takes AP classes, and wins championships at horse shows with the horses she has trained herself, finds it very relaxing after a demanding day. I have no idea why.
I'm familiar with it, but, it doesn't stop me from shaking my head. I cannot help but think of the teens who go in and videotape themselves trashing a house.
It's not just teens. I don't have kids, and I'm taking a big risk on being flamed for saying this, but, I couldn't see myself putting my kids' pictures on the web, as some parents do. Maybe I'm paranoid, but, I just can't help but think of some of the element we have running around in the world looking at those photos.
It does, but somehow kids often don't see it that way, meaning it's a valuable source of intelligence for parents. Like all valuable intelligence, it must be judiciously used, lest it dry up.
How would you know where to find it? Or, for that matter, how would you know your child even had one, especially if it was being done from school or a friend's house?
Kids are amazingly naive about the internet. They think that only their friends see their writings.
As a tech director in education, I have had some interesting experiences. One kid made specific threats against the President that included his schedule in town. The feds showed up at my home unannounced one Friday evening to take a statement. Another kid bragged (from a school computer) about the firebombing of a local business...he was arrested and found guilty. Yet another kid sued the school system claiming harassment. Her live journal told another story..she and her mother were scheming the whole thing. In court, her blog entries proved their plan and the case was thrown out.
Try this: type "sweetliberty" in the Google search engine. I did and the 5th entry down was a post from you on FR. With that in mind, type the name of the child and try that first. You might also add in search words that the child might add in their posts (such as the name of their school, their city, or their friends names.) There's no guarantee you'll find the child's posts but it's a start.
...teens who go in and videotape themselves trashing a house.
***
Ah, yes, I love stupid criminal stories.
I will never understand why some people enjoy vandalism. If someone steals something, you can tell yourself that perhaps the person really needed it, but hearing of vandalism makes me want to smack the perpetrators.
That's really what I was talking about. If it is just a bunch of girls talking about clothes and soap stars, or guys talking about skateboards and baseball, then I don't see any harm. It is when they begin divulging potentially harmful things that I begin to wonder. I don't divulge truly personal information, even on FR.
I would have no friends whatsoever. All my coworkers are immensely dim, despite their many college degrees. They can't comprehend an argument or a counter-argument. Nor can they accept a contrary view as legitimate, though you may disagree with it. They get zero facts straight, their history knowledge is scant. Yet they read one novel, and they feel educated. They listen to NPR, they feel informed.
Even the self-declared conservatives barely know anything, yet that small amount is 5x what the liberals know. They're idiots and I hate them all, but they must never know that if I wish to work and play with them.
My teens know that whatever they do on the internet is going to be audited. And they know that I will find any security infractions they might make.
I know. One of them stumbled into a verboten site, and came immediately and told me. They knew I would track it down by the weekend.
That certainly has more than a grain of truth to it.But for myself, I certainly hope that I am never ashamed of anything I post here. I was traveling yesterday and had the priviledge of sitting next to a homeschooled preacher's kid for a couple of hours. I was proud to tout FR to her, as a moderated site run by and for grownups. She mentioned debating the Declaration of Independence, and I thought that if you want to debate that you could find no better place to test your ideas than FR. She asked if it was for Christian discussions and I said it was, but primarily for conservative politics. I wish now that I had remembered Seven Stars for Aslan, which is a homeschooled child's book report on the Chronicles of Narnia (and, if you missed it, very cute and precocious).
It was fun to talk to that enthusiastic 15-yo girl, who was interested in religion and (in the sense of principles of freedom) politics. I pointed her to M. Stanton Evans, FA Hayek, and other authors.
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