Parenting

Should parents really worry about kids’ social media use?

American parents have been concerned about online dangers since they first heard the word “Internet.”

But in her new book, Microsoft and Harvard researcher danah boyd (she insists on a lower-case name) — who interviewed more than 150 teens, as well as parents, teachers, and other authority figures from 2007-10 — maintains that parental fears of teens’ online activities are wildly overblown, largely due to a combination of misinformation and a general sense of fear that has overtaken the country.

First, there’s the belief that the Internet is teeming with sexual predators. boyd takes aim at an Ad Council’s commercial on the topic, which states that, “one in five children is sexually solicited online.”

boyd tracked down the source of this statistic and found it “extraordinarily misleading,” a “misappropriation of scholarly research intended to trigger anxiety.”

The stat evolved from a 2000 study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center, which “surveyed youth to understand all Internet-related sexual contact, including that which minors desired.” When they asked specifically about “sexual solicitation,” they were including “everything from flirtation to sexual harassment,” and 75% of the positive respondents to that question said they were “not upset or afraid as a result of the solicitation.” In addition, 69% said, “The solicitations involved no attempt at offline contact.”

Part of the irrational fear of online predators, writes boyd, speaks to the difficulties some adults have of admitting certain facts about sexual abuse.

Author danah boyd (sic) explores the cultural dynamics in place around teens’ use of social media, and how parents perceive and fear it.

“The public is not comfortable facing the harrowing reality that strangers are unlikely perpetrators,” she writes. “Most acts of sexual violence against children occur in their own homes by people that those children trust. Internet-initiated sexual assaults are rare.”

She also notes that, “sex crimes against minors have been steadily declining since 1992, [suggesting] that the Internet is not creating a new plague.”

Parental anxiety about children’s time online results from other misperceptions as well, including about how teens perceive social media in general.

Many parents fear, for example, that teens have no sense of privacy because they seem to reveal everything about their lives online.

But boyd found that teens have a far more acute sense of it than many adults realize.

“The idea that teens share too much — and therefore don’t care about privacy — is now so entrenched in public discourse that research showing that teens do desire privacy and work to get it is often ignored by the media.”

That said, the way they regard privacy differs from how their parents might, in ways that “may not immediately resonate or appear logical to adults.”

When teens seek privacy, they, like most people, seek it “in relation to those who hold power over them” — which mostly means teachers and parents.

“They want the right to be ignored by the people who they see as being ‘in their business,’” boyd writes. “They wish to avoid paternalistic adults who use safety and protection as an excuse to monitor their everyday sociality.”

While teens may seem to be revealing all online, they’re really exercising control over their information by keeping it from those they wish to. One teen boyd spoke to, 17-year-old Alicia — who points out that, like her peers but unlike her parents, she has grown up with this technology — said that while she may appear to be revealing all on Facebook, her idea of privacy is exercising control over her content as she goes.

“When [adults] see [our photo albums] or when they see conversations on Facebook wall to wall, they think that it’s this huge breach of privacy,” said Alicia. “I just think it’s different . . . I think privacy is more just you choosing what you want to keep to yourself.”

As for all the time teens spend online, an amount that worries parents who see it as all-encompassing, boyd says that most teens would much prefer socializing in real life.

But a combination of heavily structured schedules, greater distances between home and school than in previous generations, and a pervasive fear that has curtailed teen freedom — many teens boyd spoke to are often not allowed out of the house for non-planned activities — have made social media the only place teens can catch up with their friends.

“Teens and parents have different ideas of what sociality should look like,” boyd writes. “Whereas parents often highlighted the classroom, after-school activities, and prearranged in-home visits as opportunities to gather with friends, teens were more interested in informal gatherings with broader groups of peers, free from adult surveillance. Many parents felt as though teens had plenty of social opportunities whereas the teens I met felt the opposite.”

Overall, boyd sees the world of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the like as today’s version of malls in the 1980s — places where teens can gather and simply be teens.

“Many adults fear networked technologies for the same reasons that adults have long been wary of teen participation in public life,” she writes. “Social media . . . are providing teens with new opportunities to participate in public life, and this, more than anything else, is what concerns many anxious adults.”