Category: Parents

The perceptions and reality of the internet in the mind of a child.

“Computers in Japan” by Sam Howzit is licensed under CC BY 2.0

By Charles McNealy

From an early age, children are taught not to talk to strangers. This develops a narrative in the mind of a child that all unfamiliar people are kidnappers and murders. Fear builds in their minds around the concept of strangers and the consequences of talking with one. Now let’s take this concept and apply it to the internet. How can children find solace and comfort in this new digital world without the fear of all these unknown people? Cernikova, Smahel, and Wright investigated children’s mental health in correlation to their experiences and awareness of the internet.

Little research has been done on how children see their mental health and how the internet impacts it. To address this, the researchers studied the common physical and mental concerns when going online. These concerns include:

  • Being kidnapped/murdered
  • Going blind
  • Vivid images or hallucinations (cognitive salience)
  • Committing suicide
  • Headaches
  • Increase in aggression
  • Tiredness/sleeping issues.

These are the major experiences and awareness’s that children reported from a study of children from the ages nine to sixteen, across nine countries in Europe (N=368). These ideals are also broadcasted from real world sources. Magazines publish articles, friends share stories, and parents spread the safety narrative. Media sources introduce an element of hyper awareness when navigating the internet. This is built off extreme events and rare occurrences. Children reported that they had experienced physical symptoms of too much online time. Commonly, people feel once you get a headache or your eyes feel sore, that it is time to get off the internet. Poor eating habits and increased aggression were also reported by children. A lack of digital literacy, or general frustration with the internet, results in something getting hit.

They also found an awareness of the possible effects of the internet. Common themes of this awareness are games leading to violence or death and being kidnapped by strangers. Many children spoke of these in terms of other children, exempting themselves from the possibility. Some children acknowledged the changing nature of the internet based on their own experiences. These accounts acknowledged the common concerns but are based solely off their own beliefs.

Two theories offer possible insight into how children are affected by the internet and the media’s impact.

  1. The Media Panic Theory, an overreaching concept of reporting only amplified and dramatic stories. On a medium such as the internet, flashy and fast stories are all the rage. These can easily spread and be accepted as normal occurrences when in reality they are sparse.
  2. The Third-Person Effect, the concept of underestimating the potential of the internet. The internet at its core is a platform for the masses, yet it can be easily forgotten that millions of people use it every day. This effect accounts for the misunderstanding of how fast the internet spreads news and how effective it is at delivering said news.

These two theories may account for the role media has on children’s awareness in regard to the internet. Cernikova, Smahel, and Wright concluded that technologies impact on children could potentially be manipulated by the media. The speed of news on the internet can make this difficult to verify. Considering this along with the media panic theory as well as the third-person effect, extreme cases can spread and influencing millions on the normality of the internet.


Cernikova, M., Smahel, D., & Wright, M. F. (2018). Children’s Experiences and Awareness about Impact of Digital Media on Health. Health Communication, 33(6), 664–673. https://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2137/10.1080/10410236.2017.1298197

Youth, sexuality, and social media

By Guest Author Kaitlin Slorey: kslorey {} yahoo.com

As with many things young people use social media for, making sense of sexuality is one of the most important and life-affecting.

It holds, then, that as a society, we need to better understand how rapidly social media technologies are transforming, and how this could overwhelm our youth. Youth face a continuous struggle of contradicting beliefs regarding sexual values and norms. Deciding which behaviors on social media should be supported or disciplined puts forth an unclear sense of “controlled freedom” for youth interacting on social media.

“a Wave of Social media” by winxEsther, licensed under CC BY-ND 3.0

Before social media, there were (and still are) beliefs that sexuality is something to be thought of as harmful to our youth, and thus has caused over-protection from sexual knowledge and openness. However, with highly sexualized popular media, these messages are nearly impossible to avoid.

When young people encounter sexual material in the media, they express moral concerns about such content, while equally valuing it as a source of information and learning.

Although young people seem more open-minded about sexuality than previous generations, Ridder suggests that they enforce stricter self-guiding morals on themselves.

Because of fast-paced changes in this digital age, this leaves little to no room for questioning or negotiating the behaviors that sexuality and social media bring about. We need to consider social media’s material as well as each platform’s important functions (particularly Tinder and Snapchat).

The results were based on 14 focus groups of Dutch-speaking youth in Belgium, including 89 participants from diverse backgrounds (52 girls and 37 boys), between the age of 14 and 19. The first 8 focus groups were conducted in 2012, and the last 6 took place in 2015. In doing so, the research was purposeful within the rapidly evolving culture of social media.

Discussion topics included displaying sexual identity, relationship status, exploring and experimenting with sexual desires through texts (status updates, hashtags, etc.), pictures (from profile pictures to selfies and snaps, etc.), and communicative interactions (chatting, commenting, texting, etc.). As opposed to direct experiences of the participants, this emphasized knowledge about values, and exploring the struggles youth face in a sexual culture in relation to social media.

Ridder noted, “When I asked young people about everyday intimate and sexual practices on social media, they usually talked about related risks and how to avoid them. Whether we talked about a relationship status on Facebook, posting or sending sexy pictures, looking for dates, or sending sexual messages, they found it smart to see sexuality as mostly private matters intended for outside of social media.”

Managing an online reputation and social media use, while balancing ambiguous social norms, was seen as a personal task where the individual is in charge of making these moral decisions. There is not one single way to understand what “good” sexual practices in social media are, but rather is heavily influenced by peer control.

Defining what is too private or what is unacceptable to share online was difficult for the participants to distinguish, but was commonly motivated by these individual moral judgments.

It was common for participants to distance themselves from their peers who behaved in a risky or inappropriate way. Whether talking about sexy pictures, messages, or dating, many of them acknowledged these kinds of behaviors causally, but the moral distancing played out as a way to respond to it in a competitive manner.

Final Thoughts

Competitive value judgments between the different focus groups may suggest a new sense of conservatism in young people’s knowledge on what’s considered “good” sexual values online. This conservatism is a way of dealing with the complexity of both perceived and real online risks in rapidly transforming social media. Relying on traditional values may be comfortable for youth, or makes this mindset of individuality a “smart” choice.

Ridder suggests society should start to engage with young people’s social media lives, interrogating what people hold as normal, natural, and healthy. Addressing the current conflicts about sexuality in the context of social media can further involve how to deal with social media overload, overlaid with issues of how society feels about sexuality and young people.

Ridder, S. D. (2017). Social Media and Young People’s Sexualities: Values, Norms, and Battlegrounds. Social Media + Society, 3(4), 1-11. doi:10.1177/2056305117738992

The importance of security in young teenage boys and girls

classphoto courtesy of ctsnowBy Guest Author Samantha Krause

I have often seen other people who do not have close relationships with their peers as weird, or just not sociable. However, it seems having a close relationship with my parents has strengthened my own, personal ability to have stronger relationships with my friends than others. We often do not think about how a person’s relationships at home can affect other relationships and aspects of that person.

In a survey of 223 sixth graders (109 girls) Dwyer and colleagues assessed their attachment, ability to adapt socially, and friendship quality off three basic tests in which they took in pairs:

  • Security Scale: the amount of security the child feels based on their own relationships with their parents at home.
  • Attributions and Coping Questionnaire: giving something/someone (in this case, the child’s friends) a reason for acting the way they do, and then deciding how to deal with the given situation.
  • Friendship Quality Questionnaire: evaluating the relationships the child shares with his/her close friends.

The results indicate that children with higher levels of security at home with their mother and father likely felt higher levels of security within their relationships with friends. Having high levels of security in the home also improved the reported self-esteem and self-confidence in a child, enabling them to be stronger individuals later in life.  If they had a low level of security, they reported feeling sad and had a harder time building and sustaining lasting, strong relationships. Lower levels of security often lead to a greater chance that the child would develop negative coping strategies, such as revenge, emotional responses, and avoidance all together.

So, parents should try to create a positive chemistry in the house and raise their children in such a way that they feel a strong security in their relationships with their mother and father. Mother’s and the father’s should have individual relationships with their children. Since boys and girls react differently to each relationship, the importance of having a strong relationship and security with both parents individually is crucial. The stronger these relationships are the more likely the child will thrive in their other relationships as they get older. S/he will have a more balanced social life, as well as a healthy psychological well-being.

Dwyer, K., Fredstrom, B., Rubin, K., Booth-LaForce, C., Rose-Krasnor, L., Burgess, K. (2010). Attachment, social information processing, and friendship quality of early adolescent girls and boys. Journal of Social & Personal Relationships, 27, 91-116.