What Your Child is Doing on MySpace?

There are a number of different things that your kids can do on the popular social networking site MySpace. They can communicate with other students that they go to school with and family members and other friends too, but are they safe?

Obviously children that use MySpace are not on there trying to find predators that will prey on them. They are there to fulfill an emotional need through the peer pressure. After all, teens have managed to place a great deal of importance on these types of social networking sites, and if you are a teen and you don't participate, you become an outcast.

Most of the time, these teenagers are there to look for their friends, putting up pictures of themselves and their friends in order to highlight their own lives and the boost their social value in that peer group. Remember, most teens are seeking to find their own identities and feel the need to live up to crushing effects of peer pressure, like having premarital teen sex, doing drugs and or drinking.

However, when adults look at these types of social networking sites, they see things a little differently than the children do. This is because parents are usually better at seeing the big picture about things that will or could happen later in the life of their child, while teenagers are more involved with what is happening right now and typically only see the things from a short term perspective effectively ignoring the long term effects and consequences of their actions right now.

When children put up pictures of themselves online and personal information about what school they go to, what sports or activities they do, they are providing the information and tools an internet predator needs to locate them in the real world. This is just one example of how kids don't understand or ignore the consequences of their online behavior.

As the single most popular social networking site in the world, MySpace is used a tremendous number of people. And while the majority of people use it with innocent intentions, there are clear many that do not and teenagers under the age of 18 present a inviting target for these individuals.

When positive attention is directed at a teen, even over the internet, these children are almost always appreciative of the attention. This attention is carefully crafted to ensure that the teen feel special and important, which they may feel on their own at the point in their lives when they are most vulnerable.

While these kids certainly do not intend to be drawn into this sort of emotional manipulation, they will gravitate towards the attention given to them by the predator, particularly if the predator is manipulative enough and if the child or teenager is pliable enough.

As a result, parents need to be more involved in what their children do both on and online. By providing children with the education that they need and the support and personal validation that they are looking for, parents can ensure that their child doesn't become a statistic at the hands of an Internet sex offender.

A long time Internet safety for children advocate, Don Schnure is president and CEO of Parental Control Products, LLC, the makers of the online acronym decoder TeenChatDecoder, and the Internet monitoring software PC Tattletale

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