One of the primary reasons teens access the internet is social networking. These sites appear to have mushroomed virtually overnight and they are here to stay.
While many are great ways of providing interactions among peers, parents must be proactive in working with their independent minded teens to recognize problems before they occur and then offer them the tools to deal with the issues as they crop up.
Are teens and chat rooms recipe for disaster? Cases of abductions and sexual assaults abound and many times a predator managed to hook up with an unsuspecting teen via an online chat room.
At times the predator may have masqueraded as another teen and slowly built a relationship that way, while at other times the assailant was indeed a teen but did not divulge that the objective of the communication was more or less with the intent of personal sexual gratification or for personal profit.
Chat rooms can be fun for reading through and responding to every topic from whimsical relationship gossip to patriotic shout outs over our men and women over seas. Though this can be a simple way to filling free time those who enter a chat room should do so with caution.
It is unexplainable to hear parents ask why is Internet safety so important? With online predators stalking children for despicable intentions is the main reason. Sexual predators befriend youth online and talk these kids into a private one on one meeting for abduction and abuse.
Every parent worries about their children’s security online. As they get older we tend to grow more confident, watching the way that they handle themselves in general conversations and observing that they’re learning to assert themselves.
But online conversations, especially when they’re one-on-one, can be much more intensive, and even older children can find themselves overwhelmed. Online predators can be very proficient at dominating conversations so that children feel unable to get out of them even after they’ve started feeling uncomfortable. You need to provide them with the tools to get the space they need to think clearly and reassert themselves.
If you have a teenage daughter, the chances are that you’ve already had arguments over food. A shocking eighty percent of Americans have tried dieting by the age of thirteen, though only a small percentage of them are actually overweight.
At this age, when the body is still developing, lack of proper nutrition can lead to long term health problems. Boys are at risk too, making up ten percent of eating disorder sufferers. For three to four percent of these children, ordinary dieting will develop into full blown anorexia or bulimia. Now, with the internet to focus their behaviour, those statistics are getting even worse.
