The Internet From Both Sides Now

For Kids it’s Just Another Fact of Life; For Parents it’s Just Another Terror

Published: October, 2004

They list Google as their favorite website, and the majority claim to send only between 0 and 5 emails a day. But every single one of them is on IM each day, with mean time hovering just shy of an hour a day.

The 75 or so students I gave this questionnaire to, are all in the 7th or 8th grade, and attend a well known private school in a Maryland suburb, but I suspect their answers are pretty typical for their age — an age where they teeter between their more carefree youths and playing for real.

I used this questionnaire (take the questionnaire yourself, coming soon) as an icebreaker to enter into a conversation about Internet safety. The conversation was filled with the subtle nuances that the darker side of the Internet holds.

The jokes and giggles were palpable tension relievers. One 8th grade boy said he’d seen a kid who wore a t-shirt that said “I’m really a 50 year old pedophile”. A show of hands told me that there wasn’t a child in the room who hadn’t been to an Internet porn site, and almost all had witnessed a cyber bullying incident of one degree or another, usually via Instant Messenger.

But for 7th and 8th graders at this school, the darker side of the Internet was just another fact of life. “It’s not just a matter of not giving out your name and address anymore,” I told them , “it’s downloading files that destroy your computer, believing people who come at you with all sorts of fantastic offers, and engaging in intimate conversations with complete strangers.”

Using their questionnaires as a launch pad, I explained why pornographers seek them out, why they find themselves trapped in pop up porn displays, why nearly 2/3 of their mail is junk, and why posting detailed Away messages and having hundreds of buddies they don’t know might not be too smart. I shared a few sobering tales of kids their own age who’d taken the net too far and trusted to voice on the other side too much. While I may have taught them a few “beware” signs, I did not scare them and certainly did not dampen their enthusiasm for all things web. I was struck by their candor, their nonchalance and their ability to take it in stride.

That evening I had a similar conversation with their parents, parents who, for the most part, are much less willing to take things in stride. For some it was a deeper look at a chat room, an IM session or a peer to peer music site then they’d ever seen before. For others it may have been the litany of all the things that they need to add to their “worry list”. But as nonchalant as the kids were in the afternoon, the parents were apoplectic as I presented a picture of the multitude of ways their kids can find trouble in the digital world.

Where’s the disconnect? It lies between the tempestuous, risk-taking behaviors of youth who never dwell too long on the consequences of their actions versus the wisdom, that somehow transforms itself into fear, of the parents. From the moment a child is born it seems their parents have an uncanny ability to visualize the worst case scenario. Perhaps it’s a compensation for their kids’ inability to be afraid of the unknown?

Intergenerational Empathy

Despite the fact the Internet Safety lecture series has become my rite of passage each fall for a new school year, I don’t often get to talk to kids and their parents on the same day. I’m not even sure the school realized how different the results can be when both generations hear the same message.

Actually, thought I say similar things to both groups they don’t hear the same message at all. The kids will come home and say something like “Mom, there’s a lady who came to school today and talked to our class. Now I know how buddy lists get infiltrated by weirdos, and I know how we got that virus on our PC”. The kids are gathering facts.

The parents are more likely to come home with say, with a certain gravitas, “Sam, we need to have a talk about the Internet and lay down some new rules. I heard some very disturbing things tonight and we need to protect you.”

But with any luck, they will discuss what they’ve heard on that day. The best results possible? Parents will try Instant Messenger themselves so that they can make informed decisions about how they want to deal. They’ll ask to see their children’s buddy lists and discuss blocking the potential unsavory characters. They’ll be better able to spot a hoax, to call the parent of a cyberbully and alert them, to spot a scam, a scheme or a URL that’s a fake. And if I’ve done my job well, they’ll do it side by side, with their kids.

The kids will appreciate the effort. In the questionnaire one of the true ironies was that the majority of kids said they knew more about the web than their parents, but also said it was primarily their parents who taught them about Internet Safety.

Not unlike the first generation of immigrants who pushed their kids to read and write English correctly, though they never would themselves, this generation of parents needs to make sure their kids are internet savvy — savvier than they can ever hope to be.

And their kids? I show them parts of the Powerpoint I’ve prepared for their parents; I paint a picture of the web from their parents point of view. As I do this, I can almost feel the kids wishing they could somehow shield their naive parents from this complex world of theirs. At the same time, it’s clear that they appreciate (in varying degrees) the rules their parents have imposed on their media behaviors from movies, to TV and now from computer to cell phone.

In a world where bad things can happen if you don’t pay attention to where you are, what you’re saying, and who you’re saying it to, parents can be helpful, I tell them. They know how to read these signs.

Internet Safety Education works best when kids can feel comfortable going to their parents if they feel threatened or unsafe, and parents can transfer their real world parenting skills to this unchartered area of child rearing.

Accidentally or not, this school took an important step, letting parents and their kids hear the same story — the story of an Internet that, as I’m fond of saying, echoes those Charles Dickens opening lines: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For Dickens it was two Cities; for kids and their parents it’s the tale of the Internet.