Tomorrow at 11am (PST), I’m going to be on the Bill Good show on CKNW. They have asked me to talk because I recently presented at my school on social media for parents.
They sent me the following two articles as some background on the issue of young children using social media.
Five million Facebook users are 10 or younger
That Facebook friend might be 10 or younger, and other troubling news
If you want to listen to the interview, you can visit the CKNW website, and click on "Listen Now" on the left hand side of the page.
I’m thinking of these basic talking points:
- The Internet is not private, it is mostly public space.
- Children need positive role-models in online social spaces, in many cases this is lacking in their lives.
- We should adopt a scaffold approach to social media, recognizing that when students graduate from school, they will be entering an unfiltered world.
- The Internet is not as dangerous as make it out to be, in many ways our physical spaces are more dangerous.
- 67% of children report being bullied offline more than online.
- Someone who knows your child is still much more likely to abuse them than a stranger.
- The Internet is permanent, and most children do not understand this. They are unlikely to look ahead and see the consequences of their actions. When we grew up, this was less of a problem because "society" forgot our mistakes. For today’s children, we somehow expect them to be perfect while they are growing up.
- Social media hasn’t changed our behaviour much, it merely amplifies both the good and the bad.
- Children are learners, and we should treat them as people who make some mistakes. They need guidance and feedback in order to learn from their mistakes.
Are there any other important points you think I should bring up?
Update: This happened and went fine. I didn’t get as much time I would have liked to talk about this issue, but I didn’t make a fool of myself either. 🙂 You can download and listen to the interview here: