Keeping Your Teen Safe online:
Part I – Part II – Part III

Twitter is an interesting social network, since you only have 140 characters to say whatever you want. You cannot post pictures or videos but you can post URLs to them. Many people have embraced twitter as a source to vent out their daily musings or to “follow” their favorite celebrities to get an idea of their life. Parents should be cautious as to how and why their kids are using Twitter. There is nothing bad about Twitter, in fact it has many advantages. The fact is teens need to be careful as to who follows them and especially what they tweet.

Keeping Your Teen Safe on: Part I – Part II – Part III

With millions of videos on YouTube, your teenager could sit at the computer for weeks on end watching different video clips. Although there is a lot of positive content on YouTube, there is also a lot of negative content as well. Although YouTube and Google strive to prevent negative content from remaining posted on YouTube, Racist, pornographic, and violent videos sometimes seep through the cracks. As with other sites that allow for interaction between different users, there is always the risk of meeting unsavory or dangerous people online.

Keeping Your Teen Safe on: Part I – Part II – Part III

Before 2004, if you had heard the word Facebook, you might have envisioned some kind of high school picture directory or a picture book that teaches how to draw cartoon faces.

Seven years and 600 million users later, Facebook means a lot more than that: for both you and your teen.

Headlines like this, this, and this are very sobering. Unfortunately, stories like these…

A recent study done by the American Psychological Association found that of all internet offenders only 5 percent pretended to be teenagers. Most of the time teens met with offenders more than 1 time. They also found that teens who engaged in risky behaviors like maintaining friend lists with people they did not know were much more likely to receive online sexual solicitations. The problem is, most teens are still not as concerned about the risks of sharing information and photos to the public.

So take the time to talk about SEXting with your kids. Make sure they know what could happen, regardless of how harmless they may think it to be. Most of all make sure you let the kids know that no matter what activity they may have engaged in, they can always talk to you about it. As long as the lines of communication are open, then there is always a means to address any issue.