Internet Safety

I talked with a mother of a 17-year-old boy. She is in her 40’s and has already raised two other children. I chose this person because she has a son at home who is very internet proficient. I wanted to see how much she knew about what her children were doing online. She is an amazing mother and is more savvy on the computer then most parents I know.
I feel that what I shared was valuable to the person that I shared with. They really did not know about many of the things that can be located online. When I asked about popular teen sites like facebook, MySpace, and online chat rooms all they could say was that it existed. This was shocking to me. I know for a fact that their children have accounts on these sites and yet they have no idea what they are. When I asked what they knew about the internet they simply said it was good for research. It makes me nervous that she does not know about the dangers that exist online. When it came to talking about online bullying and predators I got a little nervous since the person I was talking to did not know about online bullying and knew little about online predators. This has always been a scary subject for me to talk about, but I felt it needed to be addressed. This was great practice for me when I will be teacher, because I will need to talk about these topics to parents and even some students.
I shared the frontline videos with this parent. I thought that these videos would really help her understand the dangers that exist online. A lot of these videos talk about the subjects that she did not know a lot about.

Questions Asked:
Internet bullying: Did not know this existed
Online chat rooms: They exist
Online predators: They exist
Facebook: There is facebook and children are on it
MySpace: Knows of it
YouTube: You can look at videos
Anything else: You can research pap