Parents Beware: Community Chat Rooms

Related Categories: Family

Last week we discovered our daughter's page on MySpace.com. Some of you may recall MySpace.com is reportedly one of the most trafficked sites on the web, others may recall the fuss created by keynote at this summer's CFUnited conference. I'm not going to add fuel to that fire.

This posting concerns parents like my wife and I who have teenagers posting on sites like MySpace.com, Migente.com, BlackPlanet.com, etc., and are concerned with the possible dangers to which these sites may expose our kids. We have two issues:

1. Content: My daughter is considered the sweetest kid in the world by our family, friends, and neighbors but they'd all be shocked at the profanity and tackiness of the content that was on her page. Now we're all for freedom of expression but we have tried to teach her that she also has to accept the consequences of her freedoms. There are better ways of expressing herself than using profanity and racial slangs. Besides, one of my wife's tenets is "if you can't say it or do it in front of your mother, then you shouldn't be doing it." Obviously we have never heard our daughter use such language -- she doesn't even have a clue when singing the words in most rap songs (or so we thought).
2. Privacy: Rule #1 when we got our first PC back in '97 was do not put personal information on the web -- name, age, picture, address, phone number, etc. Her MySpace.com blog violated this rule. What made it worse is we had just revisted this rule with her and asked her if she wanted a myspace.com page because we knew a lot of her friends have a page. She said no and a week later she created her page. She didn't tell us because she didn't want us to view it. Then she should've only used her PC instead of the family PC where my young ones could see her page, and the pics and language her "friends" post.

So this is a warning to parents. MySpace.com has become a major concern of our school district. Search such sites for your teenager's page. These are generally used by people looking to hook up, meet & greet, etc. with the general pretext of chatting. To their credit, the sites will immediately remove your child's page if you complain and ask them.

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