Why it Can be Difficult to Monitor Your Child Online
Social media monitoring services don’t stop at companies and products – they also have the capability to monitor individual online reputations. Many HR firms, colleges, and lawyers are already using these services to learn more about new hires, people of interest, etc.
Parents have concerns about their child’s online safety and reputation, and with good reason. As a parent of a young teenager, I realize their immaturity and fascination with all things Internet. Our company offers individual social media monitoring with parents in mind, but there are a few reasons this can be more difficult than monitoring adults:
- Teens and preteens tend to use more than one email address: in our research, we’ve found that teens may create multiple email addresses for various reasons, whether it’s to create multiple accounts on a particular site or to keep parents in the dark about websites/activities/conversations they know would not be approved of.
- Teens don’t always use their real names: I’ve seen a trend, particularly on Facebook and Google Buzz (this seems to be popular among the young-teen crowd) for accounts to be created with first and middle names, or first names with symbols. Even though Facebook disapproves of using icons and symbols as part of name, it happens. Personally, when I first allowed my oldest to setup an email account, I watched as she set it up – she used her real first name with a very random last name. I asked why, and she responded, “Because you told me to never put my first and last names together online.” At least they listen sometimes.
The good news is that it’s not impossible to monitor your child’s online activities and/or reputation. The thing we have going for us, as parents, is the immaturity and not fully developed brains of our youth. They are technologically savvy, but don’t always think things through. You may learn about a new screen name, email account, or website account created by chance, especially if they use their “core” email address to create the account.
Monitoring the internet can be tricky, but if you have some basic information about your child’s online accounts (and really, you should have at least some of this), you can use a social media monitoring company or do some monitoring on your own through the search engines. Below are some tips you can use to make sure you’re looking in the right places:
1. Regularly search for your child’s email address and user account names to see if everything checks out online. Be sure to look at video and photo sharing sites, such as YouTube, Flicker, and Picassa.
2. Visit some of the more popular sites that teens use, such as Formspring, while you’re logged into your Facebook account. This will only work if you’re “friends” with your child on Facebook. Formspring is a good example of a site where it will show you which of your friends have an account on the site once you land on their homepage.
3. Keep up with the trends: learn which sites your child and his/her friends tend to frequent the most, and then stay on top of them. There are so many social media sites out there that it can make you dizzy trying to keep up with it all. The more teen/pre-teen friendly sites we’ve been hearing about lately include:
Our children need to learn how to navigate the internet safely; however, they cannot be shielded from it – this is the world they’re growing up in, and they will need these skills as adults. Keeping tabs will make this easier, and as a parent, we all need help – it ain’t easy being a parent!
