Who is your kid chatting with?

As children grow, they tend to test their independence and experiment with new things. This is true of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. But parental supervision should remain valuable online as it is offline in inculcating values and safeguards needed to make your kids useful to themselves and their society.

Last week, the news broke of Cynthia Osokogu Udoka, a 24-year-old postgraduate student who was lured to Lagos and killed by friends she reportedly met on Facebook. The sad incident brought to the fore the dark side of social media among youths. Even Cynthia’s father, retired Major General Frank Osokogu, said the death of his daughter should serve as a caution to youths who get to know friends on social media and venture to meet them.

The question is: How many parents in Nigeria know exactly how these social networking sites work? How many are friends with their kids on these sites as a way of monitoring their online presence? Not many I guess.

According to Yakubu Aliyu, a father of three who works in Abuja, “Social media sites are good for the development of the child, but they can also be dangerous if not handled properly by parents. Through social media, teenagers can be influenced by their friends and introduced to acts that are bad. Parents should know that handing a blackberry to a teenager can prove fatal if not done carefully.”

While parents adopt different parenting styles based on their peculiar differences, one thing many can agree on is trying to figure out what is the right age to allow their child to access a social networking site. For instance, children under 13 are not allowed to join Facebook but so many of them lie about their age. Eventually also they end up as friends with people old enough to be their parents.

A Child Welfare Officer, Mrs Amaka Godwin, says “Unlike friendship groups, which are not stable over time, parents are more or less permanent in an adolescent’s life. As a result, during the adolescent years, parents have the potential to maintain an influence on their children’s lives that is equal to, or greater than, the influence exerted by peers. Studies have shown that adolescents who are monitored by their parents engage in fewer risk behaviors and engage in more healthy behaviors than do adolescents whose parents did not monitor them closely.”

Now that we know that parents of adolescents can greatly reduce the chances of their children becoming involved in risk behaviors by monitoring them, what exactly are the tools that parents need to have? They basically fall into two categories: communication and supervision.

But instead of blocking your children from the Internet and risking resentment from them for several years, one thing you can do is allow them to create their own Facebook page once they are of age and then create your own account so you can monitor their behavior and whatever they are up to on the social media.

Finally, find out who your teen is-what music she listens to, what her career goals are, who her heroes are. Knowing your child better will give you clues into what she might be doing when she’s not around you. Knowing her interests also gives you something to talk about with her. This way she opens up to you on whatever you missed out of her life when you were not around.

There is every need to parents to monitor what their kids do on social networking sites. One thing you need to do is to talk about it with your children. Some kids may be embarrassed to have Mom and Dad tracking their every move on the site. While Mom and Dad may not be cool to them, you can still join their friends list to take a look at who they are interacting with. Talk to them about what is acceptable behavior like leaving comments on their page or sending emails.

If you actually sit down and talk to your children about social networking, you may find that they actually want to add you to their Facebook page.

There are a couple other things you can do to protect your children’s privacy on Facebook besides warning them of the dangers of online predators. First, make them wait until they are of age before they sign up for a Facebook account. If they create an account without your permission, call them out on it and make sure it’s deleted and then come up with an agreement with your child about waiting until they are of proper age to join the site. Second, if your child does create an account and you are okay with it, make sure they set their profile page to private.

Third, only allow your child to use a nickname or their surname. Do not allow them to put any information on the account that can identify them like the name of their school. Fourth, talk to them about accepting friends on Facebook that they do not know because these could turn out to be risky and very deadly. Fifth, trust your child and let them see that you do trust them. If you are concerned, remind them that you are going to randomly check-up on what they are writing.

Teenagers need some amount of freedom to begin their road to independence, and they need parents who monitor their behavior in a respectful and appropriate way. Careful monitoring does not mean taking away your child’s freedom to decide what he/she wants to do. You are only confirming that he actually is doing and what is right. As you find that you can trust him, your relationship with him will grow stronger and make him less vulnerable to manipulation by friends.