parenting

  1. How to Protect Your Child from Being Harmed from Cybersex: Teach them Resilience

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    During the course of researching my book, The New Age of Sex Education: How to talk to your teens about cybersex and pornography, I came upon the research of Pamela Wisniewski and her colleagues. Dr. Wisniewski's research focuses on teen internet safety and parental mediation styles. In non-scientific terms, her work helps us understand how teens navigate risk on the internet and how different parenting styles and parenting behaviors affect the behaviors of teens online. Her work is very timely and offers wonderful suggestions on how to help your child navigate the online world safely. In this…Read More

  2. Webcam Trolling and Children

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        A study recently published online in the Telematics and Informatics journal brought to light the problems of webcam trolls and how they can victimize children on chat sites. First, let's talk about webcam trolls. Many people are likely familiar with the term troll that is often used for people who post disruptive, mean, or harmful communication on the websites or social media sites of others. It is not uncommon to see a comment in the news about some celebrity replying to a troll who posted something on their social media site that is perhaps fat shaming, sexist, racist, homophob…Read More

  3. Down the Rabbit Hole: How many clicks until your child finds hard core pornography?

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    A few weeks ago, a client shared with me an experience he had with his child. Let me start by saying that I work with pornography addicts, and this gentleman has been in recovery for years. He is VERY knowledgeable about online pornography, it's dangers and how easy it is to access pornography online. My client related that his wife had found pornography on his son's phone. His son is in the 12 year old range. My client and his wife are savvy folks. They handled this situation and conversation with their son with grace, knowledge, compassion and most of all, lack of judgment. The point of this…Read More

  4. How to keep kids safe online and build trust

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    Over the weekend, an article came out in the Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3034480/The-children-young-ten-feed-internet-porn-addiction.html) from the UK discussing children as young as ten who are fighting pornography addiction. While this might have been news for the general public, this is something that is common knowledge in the field of sexual addiction treatment. The age of those addicted to pornography continues to get younger and younger. Many parents, when faced with the either the media buzz or the reality of what their child is doing online, look for resources …Read More

  5. Sexting, Cybersex & 7 year olds

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    On March 10, 2015, the Internet Watch Foundation published a report entitled “Emerging Patterns and Trends Report #1: Youth-Produced Sexual Content.” This study was conducted from September to November 2014 by sourcing content from search engines and other online sources. The findings are a bit shocking. The images that the study assessed were broken down into two age categories. 82.5 percent of the sexual images were of adolescents age 16-20 while 17.5% were of children aged 15 or younger. The images were broken down into three categories: (A) images depicting penetrative sexual activity,…Read More

  6. Keeping Kids Safe on the Internet: Some companies start to get it

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    Last week's tech news reported that some companies in the tech/app/web world were starting to implement precautions designed to keep children from accidentally accessing inappropriate or adult content. You Tube announced the launch of YouTubeKids. This is an app available for ios and android platforms specifically designed for kids. The app has kid friendly content such a Jim Henson TV, National Geographic Kids and other kid friendly YouTube shows. The YouTube kids app will filter for kid friendly content algorithmically and will also have a staff team that will manually sample videos on the s…Read More

  7. SnapChat Safety Center

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    News across the tech blogs yesterday informed us that Snap Chat has partnered with three non-profit safety organizations to help raise awareness of the safe use of its app. They also launched a safety center (www.snapchat.com/safety) which has sections for users as well as parents. The page is a great resource for adult users. I imagine that the teens are not going to go to the safety site to check things out. There are separate resource pages for community rules, safety and for parents and teachers. The safety section is limited. It does provide a link for setting up privacy settings and a li…Read More

  8. How to reduce your child’s chances of sexting: Lessons from Research

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    Recently I wrote about a research study that suggested that we look at sexting in a new framework.  Not as a legal issue but as part of the new “normal” teen emancipation.  Not only did this study provide data to support this theory, it also brought forth some suggestions for reducing sexting in teens based on their outcomes. Teens were less likely to sext if they were not responsible for paying their own phone bill, if they had less peer interactions and if their family used texting as a means of communication.  The authors suggested two potential routes for reducing exposure to sextin…Read More

  9. Why Teens Sext: Social Emancipation through Messaging

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     Sexting is in the news nearly every day.  We hear about adults getting arrested for sexting minors or minors getting in trouble for sexting each other. I have even seen news articles where parents turn their own children into the authorities when they find out they have been engaging in sexting.  Our world (or at least the media and the law) view sexting among adolescents as child pornography and a legal issue.  This view, however, does not take into account any differences between consensual and non-consensual sexting.  It also does not take into account the fact that sexting among adol…Read More

  10. Hiding from you: Teens love apps they can hide from parents

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    Where there is a will there is a way.  This is something often heard in our office.  When we are dealing with trying to limit a child’s access to sexual content in the digital world or trying to create barriers for accountability for someone with a sexual addiction, we must always remember this!  This is particularly true when dealing with parental controls and teens.  As soon as a parent installs some sort of parental control or filtering software, many a teen is online looking at YouTube to try to figure out how to uninstall the filter or get around it.  Trust me, within minutes, the …Read More