News for the Week of June 17, 2007
The top story in kid-tech news this week was the release of the Kaiser Family Foundation's new study "Parents, Children & Media," an important update...
Parents' views on kids & media
Two-thirds of parents are very concerned about the amount of inappropriate content US children are exposed to, but they're mostly talking about other people's children, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's just-released national survey. Only 20% of parents say their own children are seeing a lot of inappropriate content. The study included a national survey of more than 1,000 parents of kids 2-17 and six focus groups with parents held around the US. In other findings, 65% of parents say they closely monitor their kids' media use and only 18% say they should be monitoring more (16% say it's not necessary to monitor their kids' media use).
Of kids on the Net
Where the Internet's concerned, about 75% of parents "check what Web sites their children have visited, and even more look at how kids are profiled on MySpace and who's on their Instant Message 'buddy lists'," USATODAY reports in its coverage of the study, which quotes lead Kaiser researcher Victoria Rideout as saying parents feel they're getting on top of their kids' Internet use (yet KNX Radio's headlines was "Study Shows Many Parents are Clueless when it Comes to their Kids and the Internet"). Kaiser also found that 59% of parents say the Internet is "mainly a positive force in their children's lives"; only 7% say it's "mainly negative." And 73% of parents say they "know a lot about what their kids are doing online," Kaiser found.
In other news...
- Global child porn network busted. An international pedophile network involving more than 700 suspects was investigated by police in 35 countries, the BBC reports, 200 of them in the UK. "The paedophile ring was run by [Briton] Timothy Cox, 27, who is due to be sentenced for child porn offences." He ran a chat room, called "Kids the Light of Our Lives," that was used to exchange pictures of child exploitation. Some 75,000 explicit images were found on Cox's own computer, the BBC adds. "In total, 31 children were saved as a result of the investigation," the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre, which coordinated the international investigation, told the BBC.
- Drug-dealing on the social Web. For some time I've been writing and speaking about the other kind of support teens are finding on the Web, support for risky or self-destructive behavior — which long predates this latest, very social phase of online life. Now there's some valuable research on this — a study of "more than 10 million online messages written by teens in the past year," USATODAY reports. Conducted by Nielsen BuzzMetrics for The Caron Treatment Centers, a non-profit program in Pennsylvania, it found that teens "regularly chat [online] about drinking alcohol, smoking pot, partying, and hooking up." Only about 2% of the messages in blogs, public chatrooms, message boards, and other online spaces, specifically mentioned drugs or alcohol, says USATODAY, but the article led with the experience of an 18-year-old, now in recovery, who "wrote freely [in her online journal] about her drug use," and used the Net to contact her dealer and connect with people who had drugs. "Many of the teens who posted messages about drugs or alcohol often traded information about using illicit substances without getting hurt or caught... Other teens recounted their partying experiences, including sexual liaisons while drunk or high," USATODAY says the study found.
- Peaceful videogames? Yup. The New York Times reports that the focus of videogame makers around the world is shifting away from "violent killer videogames" to the sort of game that promotes exercise, vocabulary-building, and nutrition. "The strategic shifts in the game industry come as critics and government authorities are growing impatient with violence in video games," according to the Times. "The justice ministers of the European Union vowed last week to press for stricter regulations on the sale of 'killer games' to children." Game manufacturers aren't just responding to regulators, though, they're trying to broaden their market, as Nintendo did by introducing the Wii console. Examples are Ubisoft's My Life Coach with nutrition advice and Electronic Arts's Sommelier wine guide for the DS and Boogie for the Wii, with which users "sing and dance along with cartoon characters," the Times reports.
- Parent videogamers. I love the parenting message in this Associated Press story, and I think it applies to teen social networking as well as videogaming. Across the US, according to the AP, many parents say hanging out with their children in the virtual worlds of videogames brings kids closer "by providing a safe, convenient way to stay in touch and talk to their children on their own terms." Eighty percent of the parents who play videogames (35% of US parents) play with their children, according to an Entertainment Software Association study cited by the AP. One dad said "the time spent with his daughter... matters much more than the games themselves," and the AP cites an expert saying that "videogames equalize the physical size differences between fathers and their kids. That means children often have the edge in a video game, and they may feel more willing to communicate."
- Tragic teen grooming case Danielle and Robin Helms in Orange County, Calif., want parents to know that online teens are not too smart to fall for the manipulations of online strangers young or old. They were the parents of Kristin, who at 15 committed suicide after she and her parents "tried everything" to overcome her depression over the end of her mostly online "relationship" with a man who had groomed the girl online for over a year and convinced her they were in love. "She was a smart, well-adjusted kid who was close to her family," the Los Angeles Time reports. "She got good grades, got to school on time, ran on the cross-country and track teams and was an artist whose talent landed her in advanced classes," the Times reports. When they found out she was communicating with this man, her parents banned Net use for five months. But parents need to know that "even in the strictest of households, children can flout access rules by hopping on computers at schools, libraries, coffee shops and copy centers and by using gadgets as handy as their cellphones." And that's what Kristin did, she later told her parents. She kept in touch with her "friend" via email and phone outside her home. [See also "How to recognize grooming".]
