Sexting and Kids: What Parents Need to Know.

Common Sense Media gives parents practical advice about helping their child recognize the consequences of sending sexually explicit text messages and photos.

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OMG! What is SOCIAL MAPPING and why should I care?

Keeping up with our children when it comes to technology is no easy task. Just when you think you have social networking figured out, along comes social mapping. To understand social mapping and the implications for a concerned parent or adult, view the Common Sense Media video.

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Just a Fad?  Social media is changing the world. To our children, it's just how life is.

Sexting and Cyberbullying

A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation released January 2010 reported kids now spend an average of seven and a half hours everyday plugged in, online or connected to some type of electronic device.  Many kids are using more than one device at a time upping the screentime to just under eleven hours every day.  This is more time than children will spend in a classroom or at home with their families.  Chances are, your cell phone toting child may very well be holding on to their cell phone at night, under their pillow, unwilling to miss a call or a post on their facebook wall.  This is a stunning increase from a similar study done by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2005 when kids were spending six and a half hours each day using an electronic device and eight and a half hours when multiscreen time is added in.  Children today are supercommunicators and electronic media is their digital home.  Parents are often left standing on the front stoop, knocking on the door, asking to come in. 

Today's electronic media has virtually eliminated the adult voice for kids growing up.  Kids can now raise themselves by turning to each other for advice and support as they navigate through their complex physical, social and emotional changes they must go through to become a self-sufficient, autonomous adult.  For girls, this is particularly difficult because girls are hardwired to affiliate.  To lose a friend or become friendless can be devastating.  Many girls seeking to solidify their social standing and relationships, will turn to the internet as the weapon of choice.  It can inflict social rejection and isolation on a target and assassinate the target's reputation.  For the target of cyberbullying, there is no place to hide or escape the online assault.  Whatever is posted online, stays online, forever.

Pew Internet and American Life Project released a study in December of 2009 asking how and why minor teens are sending sexually suggestive nude and nearly nude images via text messaging.  Their study reported while 4% of cellphone owning teens (ages 12-17) were sending or had sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images of themselves to someone else via text messaging, 15% had received sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images of someone they knew via text messaging on their cell phone.  Images may have been sent to a single individual but for the intended teen receiving the images, this is clearly an opportunity to "pass it on."  What may have been meant as a private event between two individuals romantically involved has now become an event the entire school can weigh in on when the relationship ends. The study also cites a third reason for sharing images as an exchange between people who are not yet in a relationship, but where at least one person hopes to be.  In other words, sexting is flirting on steroids.