teaching your teen safe posting

the too-much-information dilemma

Here's the Problem

Curiosity about “what kind of stuff my kid is posting these days” motivated a mom to check out her daughter's Facebook wall. The mom called me after reading a post that began, “You'll never guess what my mom said the other day about my brother.” Her daughter went on to describe one of those private, good-natured teasing moments when you make a little fun, in a loving way, at a family member's character trait. What this mom read on her daughter's Facebook wall was a detailed recitation of this family's teasing moment directed at her 11-year-old son. These are not moments a family wants outed for public consumption lest they be misinterpreted. In a private family moment, the boy was fine with the teasing, but when it was shared as entertainment for his sister's hundreds of Facebook friends, absolutely not! It was embarrassing to the boy and mortifying for the mom. Needless to say, Mom was furious. “How could she be so stupid? Doesn't she know how it will make her brother feel? Our family is private! How can I ever trust her again?”

It used to be that Facebook and texting were the preferred vehicles for posting these kinds of anecdotes. Now there are myriad social networking sites and applications to choose from. Twitter allows teens to transmit information at lightning speed to hundreds more people than just their “friends” on Facebook. Remember all it takes is one retweet and the audience has grown exponentially. Using Twitter is an excellent way of notifying many people simultaneously of party locations, hang locations, and secret rendezvous spots. A parent told me about her son and his friends who saw that a house in their town, with an in-ground swimming pool, seemed to be devoid of occupants. After some reconnaissance work the teens determined that the family was away for a vacation. In a tweeting instant, literally hundreds of teens showed up for the “most awesome drinking and pool party ever”—read unsafe.

Perhaps it's a Saturday night and you and your honey decide to have a date night. The only one in your house without definite plans is your teen. You leave the house confident that he's snug as a bug in a rug and in for the night. Oh, he's in for the night all right, along with 30 or 40 of his closest friends, who stop by the moment you step out! All it took were seven simple words posted on Facebook or Twitter: “So bored, parents out, nothing to do.” And the rest is history.

Why It's a Problem

When teens post on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, they think, “How cool can I be? How funny can I be? How outrageous can I be?” Teens are smack in the middle of developing a personal identity. To do that, they need to try on different personas to see what fits. Sometimes their nature gets in the way. Perhaps they're shy and want to experiment with being someone else, so they develop an alter ego: “I can't be this funny or brave or outrageous in person, but I can be on Facebook and Twitter.” The teen girl who posted the story about her brother wasn't thinking beyond “This is funny, and everyone will think I'm funny!”

Teen brains have difficulty thinking things through to possible consequences. Were a teen to use sequential thinking it might look like this: “If I post this story about my brother, and my friends read it, then they might think it's all right to tease my brother and make him feel bad. And this does make my mom look a little insensitive. I know she was only kidding, but other people might not. I think I won't post this on my Facebook wall.” Wouldn't it be a beautiful thing if kids went through this kind of thinking before they said or did something that seems crazy to us frontal-cortex-thinking adults? But alas, teens are spontaneous and impulsive, not thoughtful and careful.

Here's the Solution

Expecting that teens will instinctively know how to navigate the real world is unrealistic. Unfortunately, Internet use is based on instant gratification, which is the energy force of adolescence. Giving your teens a framework of what may and may not be posted is a must. They need help in understanding the consequences of their behavior and strategies that give them better control of those impulsive thoughts.

Here is how the mom in that first example might talk to her daughter: “I get that it's fun to post things on Facebook that are outrageous and funny. You should feel free to do that. But it is not OK to post things about our family or friends or people you might know that could be embarrassing or hurt their feelings. You also can't post things that give out too much personal information, like our address or your phone number, or our family's plans for weekends and vacations. I know you weren't thinking this when you posted that story about your brother. But if one of your friends were to say something to your brother after reading this, he would be devastated. I know how much you love your brother and I know you would never knowingly do something to hurt him. So here's a new rule: No writing about our family without permission. You and I together will check your public postings on Twitter and Facebook at the end of every day for the first few weeks to make sure there's nothing on there that could potentially be hurtful or gives out too much personal information. If your postings seem OK, then we will check in on them every few weeks. I get that this is a learning process.”

Education + Consequence = Change