Tweens on Facebook: Start Early, Start Now

What this goes to show, is that our kids are becoming more and more technologically savvy, and they are hopping on social sites daily at a faster and younger rate. It makes me think of my daughter. She will be 6 tomorrow. I am thinking that it will be HIGHLY unlikely that in one year from now, she’ll be allowed to be on Facebook. Right now, I’m just okay with the whole Webkinz site. She certainly won’t be participating in a FB forum anytime soon. But back to technologically savvy kids… parents are finding that their teens are far more advanced in internet knowledge than they are. This can be scary and overwhelming to a parent.

With this advanced internet knowledge, I’ve had many parents say they believe that developmentally, tweens and teens need some level of privacy and should be extended trust. I agree that trust should be extended. I also think that by allowing your kids to be active on these sites is giving them trust. That doesn’t mean parents shouldn’t be thinking that they don’t monitor and protect their kids from what they are not aware is out there. Perhaps the best way to do this is by looking into the option of McGruff Safeguard in order to be ‘notified’ for critical behavior rather than monitoring every interaction that their tweens or teens have.
This gives parents the opportunity to set the stage NOW on how their child will use the internet, establishing from day one that they will monitor their kids’ activity, ensuring that they are safe from the outside, and also mentoring them on their online interactions and conversations.

Our parents were able to provide input to us on how we talked to others, how we interacted with friends, how we needed to respect other people. Kids (tweens especially) today still need that guidance; even though HOW we do it is changing. Help us help you keep your family safe online.

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