Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Social media supervision a cat-and-mouse game
Expert: Watchful parents needn’t make apologies
CHICAGO — Ayrial Miller is clearly annoyed. Her mother is sitting with her on the couch in their Chicago apartment, scrolling through the teen’s contacts on social media.
“Who’s this?” asks Jennea Bivens. It’s a friend of a friend, Ayrial says. They haven’t talked in a while. “Delete it,” her mom says.
The 13-year-old’s eyes narrow to a surly squint. “I hate this! I hate this! I hate this!” she shouts.
Yes, Bivens is one of “those moms,” she says. She makes no apology.
Nor should she, says a retired cybercrimes detective.
“There is no such thing as privacy for children,” Rich Wistocki said.
Other tech experts might disagree. But even they worry about the secret digital lives many teens are leading, and the dreadful array of consequences that can result.
Today’s kids are meeting strangers, some of them adults, on a variety of apps. Teens are storing risqué photos in disguised vault apps, and then trading those photos like baseball cards.
Some even have spare “burner” phones to avoid parental monitoring, and some share passwords with friends who can post on theiraccounts when privileges are taken away.
Exposed to tablets and smartphones at an increasingly early age, kids are correspondingly savvier about using them. Parents, by contrast, are both overwhelmed and often naive about what kids can do with sophisticated devices.
Wistocki often holds up a mobile phone and tells wide-eyed parents that giving a kid this “ominous device” is like handing over the keys to a new Mercedes and saying, “Sweetheart, you can go to Vegas. You can drive to Texas, Florida, New York, wherever you want to go.”
And yet, Wistocki says, too often parents remain in denial with what he calls “NMK, not my kid.”
Bivens uses an app called MMGuardian to manage and monitor her daughter’s phone use.
Tech experts agree that monitoring makes sense for younger kids. But Pam Wisniewski, a computer science professor at the University of Central Florida, suggests a gradual loosening of the strings as teens prove they can be trusted.
Wistocki tells parents to offer their children the “Golden Ticket,” no punishment when they come to them about mistakes they’ve made online or help they need with a social media problem.
Ayrial still isn’t happy that her mom is going through her contacts with her. The soon-to-be eighth-grader appreciates that “she cares about me,” but hopes Mom will eventually “back up” a bit.
If Mom doesn’t give her that space, she says, she’s always coming up with new tricks to get online secretly, just as her friends do.
And no, she won’t share how.