Pandora’s Blog

What a great way to start the new year and week.

A study from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health appears in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. It shows that out of 500 random MySpace pages, whose authors claim to be 18-year-old males or females in the United States, 54% talk and often brag about sex, substance use, or violence.

If you think that these behaviors aren’t semi-normal for an 18-year-old, despite the parental dismay that it may invoke, you arefooling yourself. The real issue here is that 18-year-olds are too stupid to realize that bragging about this type of behavior on a PUBLIUC FORUM (which is, after all, what MySpace, Facebook and every other website is), is just utter stupidity.

Now, while these folks were 18, and thus, not “kids” anymore… it’s a pretyt safe bet that this type of behavior (meaning the posting of details, not the acts being bragged about) was probably happening before that glorious day when all kids “become adults.”

Below I have posted the article from CNN and given links to the USA Today and AP articles on the same topic. Please read and remember the best quote I have read in a while as you read [from the USA Today piece]: “For all their Internet savvy, however, teenagers are still immature and impulsive, which can make them targets for online predators or bullies.” — Dr. Dimitri Christakis.

That is why parents needs to discuss internet safety early. That is why they need to use computer monitoring software like PC Pandora when their kids are young so they can curb behavior – like revealing too much about yourself online – at a young age.

USA Today: Kids reveal a lot about themselves online
AP: MySpace is research place for busybody ‘Dr. Meg’

Study: Teens on MySpace mention sex, violence
By Elizabeth Landau, CNN

Story Highlights

• Study: 54 percent of MySpace profiles of 18-year-olds mentioned risky behaviors
• Authors looked at 500 randomly chosen Web profiles from U.S. teens
• Many teens took down content or made profiles private after e-mail warning
• Experts: Parents should know what their children are doing online

A new study finds that 54 percent of teens talk about behaviors such as sex, alcohol use, and violence on the social networking giant MySpace — presenting potential risks even if all they’re doing is talking, researchers said Monday.

The study looked at MySpace profiles of 500 people who identified themselves as 18-year-old males and females in the United States. References to risky behaviors included both words and photos, the authors said.

Not all teens who write about risky behaviors in their profiles actually engage in them in real life, said Dr. Megan Moreno of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, one of the authors of the study, which appears in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

They may instead talk about sex, substance use, or violence because they are contemplating doing those things, or because they want to brag without actually doing what they say, Moreno said.

Even if teens have not actually engaged in risky behaviors but merely brag about them online, this can still affect their future behavior, said study co-author Dr. Dimitri Christakis, professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington and director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

Those who lie about the behaviors to show off may receive positive feedback from others — comments such as “that’s great” or “I do the same thing” — that encourage them to actually try out the behaviors, he said.

Apart from that, teens who claim such behaviors are more likely to be victims of bullying and unwanted invitations for sex, he said.

In a second study, Moreno and colleagues identified 190 profiles of 18- to 20-year-olds that contained three or more references to sexual behaviors or substance abuse. The authors then made a profile of their own, called “Dr. Meg,” from which they sent a single e-mail to half these profiles, warning them about the risky information and offering information about clinical resources.

They found that, after three months, 42.1 percent of the profile owners who received the e-mail — and 29.5 percent of those who did not — either removed references to risky behaviors or made their profiles private.

“It’s really not that MySpace is bad or good. I think the lesson is that it’s a tool, and how you use it determines the kinds of outcome you’re going to get,” Moreno said.

Experts say the bottom line is that parents should get more involved in the online lives of their children.

“I tell parents that they should absolutely create their own MySpace and Facebook page,” Christakis said. The study inspired him to create his own Facebook account, and his 10-year-old already wants to know about his “friends,” he said.

In some cases, parents should even have their children’s passwords for these social networking sites, especially when the children are around age 13 or 14, said Vivian Friedman, child-adolescent psychologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Friedman was not involved with the study, but she is well aware of the problem. One of Friedman’s patients, the daughter of a preacher, posted nude photographs of herself online, a move that cost her father his job, Friedman said.

But she said 54 percent as a figure for profiles with risky behaviors seems too high, given that most of what happens on social networking sites is “chit-chat.”

“I have parents that catch their kids bragging about something on MySpace, and when you actually confront them, the kid says ‘I really wasn’t doing it,’ and they can prove they were not at the party where they were supposed to have been drinking,” she said.

Beyond keeping a watchful eye on risky interests and pictures, parents should also use social networking sites such as MySpace — which had about 120 million users as of this summer — as an opportunity to learn about their childrens’ favorite movies and hobbies, as well as their top friends, she said.

“You so often hear parents say ‘I don’t even know my kid anymore.’ Here’s a very easy tool to get to know your kid again,” she said.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 3:10 PM and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.