While parents have been leery of the safety risks posed by social media, they also face the age-old argument posed by children in the face of an allegedly unjust prohibition: "if you can do it, why can't we?" Lacking a convincing rationale, many parents are throwing in the towel and letting pre-teens use social media -- and in fact are often helping them, in a strategic move that allows them exert some kind of oversight and supervision.
According to a new survey of 1,000 U.S. adults by Liberty Mutual's Responsibility Project, the number of children ages 10-12 who have a Facebook or MySpace account doubled from 2009-2010. These are some of the results from that survey:
- 17% of parents say they don't see a problem with younger children using the sites.
- 11% said they have actually helped their children create accounts on these sites (circumventing Facebook's policy forbidding anyone under age 13 from joining the network).
- 44% of parents say they try to limit the amount of time spent on the Internet or texting.
At the same time, a new survey of 4,427 adults in the U.K. suggests that social networking can have a negative effect on schoolwork:
- 20% of parents saying their children's academic performance had suffered because of excessive time spent on sites like Facebook and MySpace, as well as social gaming.
- That number increased to 36% among parents of children ages 6-11.
Other studies have blamed social media for an even wider range of pre-teen maladies, including psychological problems: in November a wrote about a study from the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine warning that excessive use of social media -- specifically, "hypertexting" (sending more than 120 messages per school day) and "hypernetworking" (spending more than three hours per day on sites like Facebook) -- is linked to dangerous health problems and antisocial behavior in teens.
Among the Case Western findings, teens who hypertext are twice as likely to have tried alcohol; 3.5 times more likely to have had sex; 40% more likely to have tried cigarettes; 41% more likely to have used illicit drugs; 43% more likely to be binge drinkers; 55% more likely to have been in a physical fight; and 90% more likely to report four or more sexual partners. Hypernetworkers were 60% more likely to have four or more sexual partners; 62% more likely to have tried cigarettes; 69% more likely to be binge drinkers; 69% more likely to have had sex; 79% more likely to have tried alcohol; 84% more likely to have used illicit drugs; and 94% more likely to have been in a physical fight.
Some social networks seem designed for bullying and abuse: Formspring allows pre-teens and teens to pose questions about themselves which are answered anonymously, often with devastating effect. This bizarre network earned notoriety following the suicide of 17-year-old Alexis Pilkington, a high school student in West Islip, Long Island, after she received a string of vicious messages on Formspring.
Of course, the fact that the questions are posed voluntarily highlights the most difficult part of regulating social media use by kids -- namely, that it's voluntary. Likewise, I would argue most of the negative behaviors linked to social media by well-meaning critics are in fact simply reflections of the many troubling issues which face kids and adolescents in modern society.
COMMENARY: I have always believed that children under twelve years of age should not be permitted to open a Facebook account, or allowed to use social networks, even under the supervision of their parents. There are far better options available for tweens online. Furthermore, time spent online by children can have drastic effects on a child's social development and education. The U.K. study clearly supports the latter.
It's bad enough that children are using the internet at such a young and tender age. The internet is a danger zone of potential mischief and abuse. I am not just talking about adult content that could accidentally appear during a Google search, but the potential for bad language, bad behaviors, verbal abuse and bullying by other children, and even worse--the potential for exposure to pentophiles that prey on young children.
Parent's should draw a line on social networks like Facebook or MySpace when it comes to their tween-aged children. Don't go there. No matter how many precautions a parent or Facebook takes, they cannot prevent tweens from abusing that privilege by "accidentally" or purposely veering off course, and there is no telling what they will find at the end of that journey.
Courtesy of an article dated May 9, 2011 appearing in MediaPost Publications The Social Graf
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