MySpace Parental Safety
Most parents with children who are on the Internet need to know about MySpace parental safety in order to keep their kids safe.
What is MySpace?
If you’re not that interested in social networking yourself, you might not know that much about MySpace. Basically, MySpace is an online community where people have “friends” who can view their information and chat with them on the site.
The idea is that you meet people through your friends and link up to other people who become your friends and it becomes a giant community of people who share similar interests.
A person with a MySpace page shares basic personal information and can post music clips, videos, pictures, blog posts and more.
The only problem is, there isn’t a lot of oversight into who is on MySpace and if people are who they actually say they are.
MySpace Dangers
You need to be aware of MySpace parental safety issues because there is always a risk that your child is talking to someone who isn’t who they say they are. There have been many reports of sex offenders looking for (and sometimes finding) new victims on the site, and reports of other crimes have been bragged about, sometimes in advance of the crime, on MySpace and other social networking sites.
As in the world at large, it’s likely that most people on MySpace don’t want to harm your child. But there are some precautions you can take as a parent to make sure your child has a good experience on the Internet.
MySpace Parental Safety Tips
One of the most important things to know about MySpace is that children under the age of 14 are not allowed on the site. Don’t let your child lie about his or her age in order to sign up. If your child has signed up for an account and isn’t yet 14, contact MySpace and get the account shut down.
Talk to your child about the fact that MySpace is a public place and you never know who might see the information that is posted. Tell them not to gossip or talk about other people in a way they wouldn’t to the person’s face. And remind them that just because you’re an adult doesn’t mean you can’t find their site and see anything they post that might be objectionable to you.
Remind them that while having “friends” is a lot of fun, people can easily misrepresent who they are online. Encourage them to only have friends who are people they actually know, or to limit communication outside of MySpace with people they don’t actually know.
Tell them that if anyone from MySpace who doesn’t know them asks for their e-mail address or phone number that they should talk to you before giving out that information. And if a person online wants to meet them, they definitely should talk to you. Additionally, if they run into someone who is spouting derogatory language, hate speech or anything else inappropriate that they aren’t comfortable with, they should let you know.
The best thing for adults to do when it comes to MySpace parental safety is to have a conversation with their children before the account is established. Remind them that you’re not trying to spy on them or keep them from having a good time, but that their safety is important to you. If they ever feel uncomfortable about anything that is happening online, they should be willing to come talk to you about it.
Setting some ground rules about how much time can be spent on the computer not working on homework or keeping the computer in a communal area of the house so you can easily check on what your children are doing is another option that may work for your family. The key is that both you and your children are comfortable with the rules and that they are enforced the same for every child so no one feels like they are being singled out.
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