“How are you supposed to parent well when the lid’s come off?” my friend, recently asked me.
“How are you supposed to parent well when the lid’s come off?” my friend, recently asked me.
Every parent knows exactly what he means. Bad stuff is oozing from everywhere onto our kids and we can’t seem to contain it anymore. Here’s a case in point.
Internet socializing scares the pants off of most parents of teens—particularly teen girls. And a new study just released in the journal Pediatrics shows us why we should be afraid.
After following 250 girls ages 14-17 for 18 months, the study found that 30% of the girls met offline with someone whom they met online. While this might sound harmless to the casual reader, think about the fact that any one of these encounters could kill a girl.
The study also found that girls who had experienced mistreatment (sexual abuse, physical abuse or neglect) were at higher risk for meeting up with folks off line. Interestingly, girls who had parents who were involved with their girls and doing a decent job of parenting were protected far more than the girls who didn’t have parents involved. The researchers concluded that “high quality parenting and parental monitoring moderated the associations between adolescent risk factors and internet behaviors, whereas use of parental control software didn’t.” This is fascinating.
