<a href="mailto:avanvalkenburg@pressrepublican.com">By ANDREA VanVALKENBURG</a>
PLATTSBURGH — Blogging, social networking, chatting, gaming and instant messaging.
For teens, these are part of their daily cyber lives; but to many parents the popular online activities are foreign and unfamiliar.
An Attorney General investigator said knowing these concepts is the first step in protecting Internet-savvy children from online predators.
“Your children live very robust lives online,” Chad Shelmidine told the people gathered for a recent Sunrise Rotary meeting.
“You are your child’s Internet-access provider … and you need to set limits” and know what they’re doing.
The Watertown-based investigator said the best way to understand children’s online activity is to have them show how each of the programs work and then to monitor the ones they use.
He said the activities can be beneficial for teens by enhancing their creativity and communication skills. But, Shelmidine said, they can become an obsession that can easily lead to hidden dangers like child predators and identity theft.
He said it’s especially important that parents talk to their children about limiting the information they give out while chatting on social-networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.
“What you say online stays online, even if you take it off.”
Another safety option for using social-networking sites is to make sure users set their profiles to “private,” which means only authorized people can access their personal pages.
Often, he said, especially in chat rooms, children can unknowingly open themselves up to pedophiles looking to “groom” new victims by forming online friendships they hope will lead to real-life relationships.
“You just don’t know what type of people are out there.”
Monitoring a child’s behavior online, Shelmidine said, can also indicate whether they’re experiencing problems like harassment or if they’re doing something inappropriate.
Signs that a child may be doing something a parent wouldn’t approve of, he said, include a child receiving gifts, becoming withdrawn, wanting to spend all his or her free time online or constantly minimizing the computer screen when adults are nearby.
Simply opening the lines of communication between a parent and child, Shelmidine said, can help protect young Internet users.
“You need to encourage them to report a problem, and you need to have your kids come to you if they have a problem.”
Worried parents can purchase monitoring software to help them keep tabs on their teen’s online activity and should consider keeping the family computer in an open area of the home.
Shelmidine also suggests that parents monitor their kid’s cell-phone usage, since many phones can be used to access the Internet.
To read more about keeping kid’s safe online, visit www.oag.state.ny.us or www.netsmartz.org.
E-mail Andrea VanValkenburg at:
avanvalkenburg@pressrepublican.com
