| Thoughts From The Editor - Feb 2010 |
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Given the choice, I would have rather have lived in the 50’s, an era where life was simple, people worked hard for less but in terms of things that truly matter, had more. The families that lived next store were the same families that their grandparents knew, just a new generation of them. They did more with less, they had one TV that as a family at night they would watch. They had one telephone that was probably on the wall next to the dinner table, so your parents knew who was calling. There was no cell phones, kids just knew when they had to come home. Children played outside all day, they built snowmen and forts, they rock hopped in the streams, they played stickball and hide and seek, they climbed to the highest point of a mountain at night to look down upon the city lights. Simple things. Im not saying kids never got into trouble because kids will be kids, but at least back then when you tucked your child into bed at night you knew they were safe from the world outside. Fast forward sixty years…….Welcome to the highway of technology, a highway that never sleeps and a highway that you don’t need to leave your home to travel on. A highway filled with wealths of information that can help you or harm you. Recently a friend of mines daughter fell into the harmful road of the computer highway and got ran over by a vehicle called Facebook. Facebook, for those of you who don’t know what it is, is a social networking site online that helps you to connect with “friends”. It was originally made up for college students as a way to reconnect with their old friends but it has since turned into the main site that children as young as elementary school are accessing from their homes every day. My friend’s daughter had someone hack into her site pretending he was her and changed everything on her site, not for the better. After the site was shut down, he continued to harass her by texting her cell phone with threatening messages. Scared, she never revealed the threats to her parents until finally they went to far and became more then she could handle. After contacting the police and tracing down who the young man was it was revealed that he was someone from another state, a complete stranger , a dangerous stranger, who knew everything about her life and someone she innocently without knowing, may have let into her site as a friend. Their family was one of the lucky ones, the problem was resolved , the facebook was closed and they put the incident behind them with a lesson well learned. But not every child is that lucky, and not ever family walks away from a cyber-stalker or predator with their child unharmed. One of the problems with facebook is that kids want to have friends, as many friends as they can. They let in virtual strangers, friends of friend of friends . They don’t know who they are, they just think it’s safe because someone wants to be there friend, so they hit the accept button and without realizing it they let a stranger, who could be anyone, walk right into their world. I went onto the site myself and did some investigating. Nine out of ten children whose site I punch up was unprotected. It was blocked partially, but not correctly, so I was able to see their pictures and their information, the town they live in, their parents names, what school they went to. I also notice that most of the kids, it didn’t matter how old they were, had 300 to 500 friends, the one who stalked my friend’s daughter had almost 700 friends. Nobody had 700 friends!!! After to talking to several parents I came to find at least one in three that I spoke to had an issue with Facebook or some type of cyper bullying. A few of those parents are involved in legal battles that have now taken them into the court systems to confront thier cyper-bullies and to press charges. We want to keep our children safe yet we want them to have the freedom to be like all the other kids ,but the internet is a dangerous place and one bad decision, one innocent mistake, can change the life of your child forever. Be vigilant about checking their Facebook friends, make sure they know who their friends are, make sure you know who their friends are. Also go into their settings and make sure it is set on “Friends Only”, this way strangers cannot see their pictures or personal information. The danger is real and it happens more than you may want to believe. Help keep them safe by keeping your eyes open. Now go tell them to get off the computer and have some old fashion fun in the snow…..its the simple things in life, generation after generation, that will always remain the best life has to offer! |
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