Techie Homeschoolers

After reading the news about Phoebe Prince, a freshman at South Hadley High School (in a middle to upper class community in Massachusetts), who hung herself due to cyber bullying, I couldn’t help but to wonder how this kind of behavior could have gone unnoticed, or untreated for that matter.

The “untouchables” is the nickname they’ve been dubbed on The Boston Globe. These mean girls who hounded Phoebe through text messages, social networking groups, and even in person, have been left literally unscathed by the event- even further mocking Phoebe after her death.

The main question I had for this situation was: how do we 21st century parents help to prevent this kind of bullying?

Do we restrict or limit access to the computer?  Do we prevent our children from having social networking accounts?

As a tech savvy parent, I have had to think about this often and mull over some solutions that will fit my kids now in the early years and in the years to come when they become teens.  For now, my children lay low in the social networking arena since they are underage and don’t have Facebook or MySpace accounts.  I have even had to reconsider using full first names for my children under my own blogs and accounts online as well.

But when they are older and become more media savvy, how do I prevent cyber bullying from happening to them?  Some children/teens can be cruel–there’s no getting around that.  How do parents take a proactive role in keeping our kids and teens safe from the exploitation of cyber bullying?

1. Educate our children on web savvy behavior, such as never revealing last names or passwords. I think one of the most important steps to helping to prevent cyber bullying is to help our children to become aware of how to keep themselves safe online.  Small tips like keeping passwords safe and not revealing last names helps.
2. Supervise your kids online.  When at home, it is important for parents to keep tabs on what your kids are doing on the internet.  Placing the computer in a safe, common area (such as the living room), helps keep us parents aware of what is happening with our kids online.
3. Install parenting controls. With software such as Net Nanny, a parent can install internet filtering on home computers as well as for cell phones.  With the onslaught of cyber bullying via text messaging today, parents can also some control over at least knowing what is going on via their kids’ phones.  Here is what the Net Nanny website quotes their software solution does for the cell phones:

Parents now have the ability to view all e-mail messages, along with all (SMS) text messages and multi media (MMS) messages transmitted and received by the device.

Key Word Alert: Net Nanny Mobile “Alert” notification monitors keywords identified by the parents as words that could be potentially alarming. When one of the key words is contained within a text message or email, to or from the child, the parent is notified immediately via e-mail by Net Nanny Mobile.

From any computer on the Internet, parents are given complete insight into the mobile activities of their children.

4.)  Another tip: train your kids to delete messages without opening them.  Not only will this prevent spam and virus attacks, but it also helps to filter out info that could be emotionally harmful to your children.  If they don’t recognize the sender or the subject line looks “fishy”, don’t open it.  Generally, I like to do a quick scan on my email accounts each day for emails that appear in my inbox (which are not first caught by my “junk mail” folders).  If there are emails that I don’t recognize, I have trained myself to automatically highlight and delete them without fully opening messages or attachments.  This should be something we train our students to do as well.

5.)  Apply message blocks. If we learn to use the technology our kids are using, we can effectively help them to block unwanted messages on their cell phones, social networking accounts, and email accounts.

These are just a few small tips to help parents and teachers to step into the direction of being proactive with our kids’ technology experiences.  Although taking away all access to social media and technology can actually prevent our children from experiencing cyber bullying when we are present, it does not effectively prepare our kids to learn how to be proactively careful in their own online and cell phone activities.  We just have to teach them and train them to use technology safely.

As for cyber bullies- obviously these kids have severe emotional and psychological hang ups, that they would get some demented type of pleasure out of harrassing other people online.

But….that’s another story and another set of solutions to be tackled on another day.

For now, let’s just learn to keep our own kids safe…

And last tip:

Perhaps we can bring more community awareness to this problem by starting up community-wide and school initiatives. Our schools and community programs need policies in place to deal with these types of behaviors.  We can’t wait until it’s already happened- then it’s too late.