Middle school principal: ban your kids from social networking sites

That's awesome. I still wouldn't let my kids surf the internet unmonitored.

 

Bullying in the middle school (and to a lesser extent, the elementary and high school) years is an unavoidable fact of life. Kids have been doing it for centuries (think Nellie Olsen from the Little House series).

Social networking sites are just an updated version, albeit a lot more public one, of whispers on the playground or the telephone grapevine. To say that the bullying/ostracizing/clique-forming problem would go away if parents kept their kids off of Facebook or IM or whatever is naive. I'm sure the middle school principal took part in some of this when he was, oh, 8-14 years old, and I'm sure his dad did too and probably his grandfather before that. It's a new form of a very, very old issue.

All that said, yes, parents should monitor social networking sites of young teens and have very frank discussions with high schoolers about the implications of making their private lives public like that, if simply because they gain greater insight now and because poorly protected social networking sites open up the very outside chance of predation from an adult. But eliminated Facebook pages stopping kids from being picked on? They don't understand kids very well then.

But I would argue, Bob, that parents don't have a clue what goes on in school hallways or on the bus or is talked about every day on the walk home either, especially with young teens. You rely on the willingness of your kid to talk in that situation, the same thing you're relying on with unmonitored internet usage.

 

Neither would I, but not because the predator boogeyman.

 

Yes, Smash, it's gone on since forever, and will continue to do so. A few things have changed, though:

1. A growing consensus that bullying isn't just some phase that kids grow in and out of, and a growing consensus that the effects of bullying have long-term negative impacts for the victims -- and the bullies.

2. Technology that allows the things whispered in the hallways to travel at even faster speeds than they did before, and more than that does not allow for an escape from any school problems. The way I've heard it explained was that in the old days of bullying, you at least could catch a break when you got home because your bully wasn't around to bother you. Now your bully can find your Facebook page and let loose.

I don't think this principal is naive enough to believe kids will stop picking on each other if they're not on social networking sites. But them not being on social networking site makes the behavior, in theory, a little bit easier to control and deal with. I think he also wrote the note because parents didn't have the first clue as to what their kids were doing online.

 

Not trying to trivialize this but the easiest way for a kid to fix No. 2 is to change the privacy settings on his/her Facebook page. You don't have to let the entire world have access to your page.

 

No doubt. But I would suspect the principal knew most parents would be lost if he tried to give them a tutorial about privacy settings, especially considering how much Facebook makes you hunt to find them.

In fact, I would suspect that the principal realizes no kid is losing a Facebook account over this. The intention was to wake the parents the fuck up.

 

I agree. My point was more to the fact that the kid being bullied on-line has the power to, if not stop it outright, at least limit the bully's access should he/she choose to do so.

 

As someone who was bullied, I disagree with the second part. Being at home wasn't a respite - it was the dread of what kids were saying to each other when they were hanging out or what I might have to face at school the next day. In a weird way, I'd have like to have known what they were saying at times - it certainly couldn't be worse than what I was dreaming up.

And while we may know more about the effects of bullying (and it's certainly not a good thing), I think it's a natural part of growing up in a weird way, like teenage angst or the toddler's desire to chew on things that have been on the floor. I think the only way you avoid it entirely is if you have a single child, since siblings are often the most merciless bullies of them all, and keep that child from spending much time around any other kid.

Bullying is not a good thing, but neither is an adolescent's obsession with body image, and both are as much developmental stages (one social, one physical) as anything else. You try to give your kids knowledge about better ways to deal with things, but to think that you can totally eliminate the problem through prevention alone is naive.

 

It wouldn't be my only reason, but it'd be one of 'em.

 

Your kid would be approximately a bajillion times more likely to be predated by a family member, teacher, or athletics coach than someone they met randomly on the internet.

 

Jesus, man. I never said internet predators were the world's number one problem. Just that it would be one of the many reasons I'd monitor my kid's internet usage. Not that difficult a concept, really.

Quick, what's Ryan Howard's FJLGHNGRTYPW rating?

 

I'm not getting on you specifically. I just think it's important to note that we have a generation of parents who spend a lot of time and energy fearing the wrong things. They fear things that are statistically extremely remote and get lax on the things that actually do hurt kids on a regular basis.

I don't know Howard's rating on that stat, but I'm guessing it puts him in the non-elite echelon.