Concerned Parents Online

Monday, July 31, 2006

Teenage Girl Sexually Assaulted After Myspace Meeting

Honolulu alone has had four arrests for MySpace related sexual assaults- this article reports "Th[ese] kind[s] of incident[s] [are] changing the way parents and teens are using the Internet."

These sorts of MySpace dangers are not going away- when will we as parents learn how to do enough to protect our children?

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

the HUB

This writer suggests that maybe, just maybe, if parents continue to get on sites like MySpace and the like, they just won't be so cool anymore...

Revolution Portal - Science, Tech, Gaming - General - News - Marines To Start Recruiting Over MySpace - News

Creeps aren't the only ones looking for your kids on the Web. According to this article, the Marines have joined MySpace to seek out new recruits.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Where did all the kids go? - Los Angeles Times

Chris Erskine:
Man of the House
Where did all the kids go?
Boys and girls used to romp everywhere on a summer day. But now ...
July 13, 2006

THIS MIGHT be the first summer in history when no kid ever goes outside. Never breaks a window with a baseball or rolls in the grass under an August moon. Never tastes an apple off a neighbor's tree or sets up a lemonade stand to make, like, 87 cents.

Yep, this might be the summer it all ends. It'll be the first time baseball gloves sit idly in the garage for months, and bikes rust alongside the house, lonely and untouched.

Why? Because kids don't like to leave the house anymore. And who can blame them, not when they have cellphones and PlayStations, Facebook and the latest videos? Listen, ever seen a football? It just sits there in the bin in the garage, inert. Give a kid Madden NFL on Xbox anytime. Touchdown! Yessssss!

I say good for them. Personally, it's a relief not to have kids all over the place outside, playing in the sprinklers or throwing rocks at crows. They used to make a lot of noise, those kids.

Some adults thought their voices a sort of sweet summer music. Not me. Without all those kids around, I can hear the freeway a lot better, thank you very much. Every time the neighbor's air-conditioning compressor kicks on, it's clear as a bass drum. Ka-BOOM.

It's mid-July, and so far I haven't seen a single kid. I've looked up one street and down the next, the only things moving are the bees in the lavender. I've looked in the trees, on the ball fields, in the parks, in the pools.

Sure, it's hot — you can almost smell Las Vegas in the desert wind — but that never stopped a kid before. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the backyard.

It happened pretty recently, this absence of kids. Forty years ago — even 10 — you used to see kids everywhere, on skateboards and bikes, playing hopscotch or grooving a jump shot.

Back then a kid would wake up on a summer day and go off with friends, dawn to dusk. Mothers would have to scream from the porches for the kids to come home to eat.

"I'd better go," you'd finally say after 20 minutes of mother-screams.

"Really?"

"Yeah, I'd better go."

"See ya after dinner," the friend would say.

Back then, the boys of summer climbed trees (those big green things that tower over houses). They used to ride bikes for miles and miles, till their legs ached and their lungs burned, spitting constantly, because that's what you did back then. You spit a lot. Pi-tuuuu. Pi-tuuuu.

Back then, boys and girls would run and run, wrestle and swim. By July 4, the bottoms of kids' feet would be tough as rawhide. They could walk barefoot across Venus. They could tiptoe across the sun.

It couldn't have been good for them, all that exercise. Back then, kids had ribs that stuck out over their swim trunks. They had waistlines. They had tans.

Seriously, it was almost prehistoric. I'm talking about the '60s and '70s, when kids didn't even have e-mail. That's right, no e-mail. If you wanted to talk to someone, you used the phone — or worse — got up out of a chair and went next door. Knock-knock. Hi, can Jimmy play?

It was awful. There was no text messaging. No laptops. Instead of computers, a kid would have a roll of dime store caps, which he'd smash with a rock, pop-pop-pop. He'd burn leaves with magnifying glasses. Or unravel old golf balls just to see what was inside. Sometimes, kids fished.

At night, they'd play Kick the Can, possibly the greatest game ever invented.

In Kick the Can, one kid was "it" and tried to catch the other kids hiding around the neighborhood. Amid the shadows and the moonlight, Kick the Can was spooky-quiet one moment and full of mayhem the next — a good preparation for police work or parenthood.

And the things kids kept? What junk. Bottle caps and spark plugs. Squirt guns and pea shooters.

"Tom [Sawyer] was literally rolling in wealth," wrote Mark Twain of his ultimate American boy. "He had … 12 marbles, part of a jew's-harp, a piece of blue bottle glass … a key that wouldn't unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six firecrackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass doorknob, a dog collar — but no dog — the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange peel and a dilapidated old window sash."

Had it all, young Tom did. Back in the olden days. Back when boys went outside.

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com, or at myspace.com/chriserskine.

Life Support: Dads make MySpace way uncool:

This is a great and funny article I found online- Chris Erskine is encouraging parents to take on MySpace roles, establish profiles, and look out for their kids:

"In the end, here's my take on MySpace. Like rock 'n' roll, it's a phenomenon that's not going to cave to pressure from the PTA. In fact, its subversive nature feeds on Mom and Dad's disapproval.

But like anything a teen does, it requires a certain amount of adult supervision. How much? How often? That's the million-dad question.

My hunch is that the best way is to climb aboard, maybe even establish your own site, which -- if it doesn't make you cool -- at least shows your children that you're concerned for their safety.

Kids. They pretend not to care that we care. But deep down I think they do. How uncool is that? Hey, maybe they're human after all. "

He also talks about the profile he, himself established:

"So far, our paternal bid to take over MySpace is still a work in progress, but we plan to stay the course, because that's what dads are famous for. By saturating MySpace with dads, we will liberate the Internet and make it a safer and less interesting place -- sort of the Internet equivalent of Omaha.

For example, my site (myspace.com/chriserskine) features a photo of me in a checkered apron, standing in front of my barbecue holding a beer and a pair of tongs.

Sometimes things are so uncool (Napoleon Dynamite and Tony Bennett spring to mind) that they somehow become cool.

I caution you: This did not happen with this site, which also includes a photo of my nemesis, the loopy little beagle. Also in the works is a new shot of me raking the back yard.

"It'd be good to have some action shots," I told my daughter.

"Yeah, whatever," she said.

"Wait a second, let me get the weed whacker," I said.

"Chill, Dad. OK?"

As if this isn't way cool already, I soon plan to add barbecue recipes, home repair tips and my heartfelt prayer-poem for the Chicago Cubs, which I've been working on now for more than 35 years."

Cute, funny and definitely worth a read- another concerned parent looking to stay involved in his children's life: both on and offline.

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Teens, sex and MySpace - Law - Times Online

This article poses some interesting questions and offers the following, very intriguing, analogy:

Imagine this: Pete and Julie, a couple of teenagers, meet at a local coffee shop. After phone calls and emails, they arrange a date - McDonalds and a movie - and one thing leads to another in the back seat of Pete's car. When Julie’s mom finds out, she’s furious, especially as Julie is only 14. Pete is practically a jaded oldster at 19. Result: family hires lawyers who announce that they’ve identified a perhaps unexpected culprit. According to the family, the coffee shop is to blame for putting Julie in a position where an "adult sexual predator" (namely Pete) could sweet-talk the girl into an eventually dangerous situation. The family sues the shop’s owners for $30 million, which their lawyer says is a "bare minimum" to compensate the damage done and to punish them for not better chaperoning their premises.
Of course, this wouldn’t have been the most talked-about American lawsuit of the past month had Pete and Julie actually met at a coffee shop. As everyone now knows, they instead met on MySpace, the smash-hit "social-networking" website whose popularity with the teen set has helped make it the most trafficked site in the United States (and which, like this site, is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation).

Monday, July 17, 2006

First Coast News - Tech News - Myspace Identity Theft

And another reason to make your MySpace page private:

It seems as though MySpace has been experiencing some user identity theft- users creating false identities for people they may know through school or work for the purposes of impersonation or sabotage.

MySpace members credited in upcoming movie - vnunet.com

Yet another piece that shows just how popular this site is becoming. Any and all MySpace users who add the Clerks II site to their list of friends will be cited in the movies credits...

So now your kids aren't just on the Internet, they're on the Big Screen...

Thursday, July 13, 2006

ElectricNews.net:News:MySpace more popular than Yahoo and Google

MySpace has been ranked the number one website in America... No surprise given the attention it has been receiving.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

MTV News - How 'Yours' Is Your MySpace Page? Some Cautionary Advice ...

Even MTV is warning against posting too much info on MySpace and Facebook- the article's moral: "Think before you post."

While this article is directed to a slightly older crowd (applying for jobs, etc), the message rings true- don't post anything on the Internet that you wouldn't want your mother (or principal or potential employer) to see!

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Star-Telegram | 07/11/2006 | MySpace from two viewpoints

Two magazines have analyzed MySpace with two totally different outcomes.

Is it "the hottest social networking site on the planet" as Wired magazine indicates? Or perhaps is it a web for danger with "sexual predators lurking on the site" as claims Fortune magazine?

Or is it both?

Perhaps more than anything, this article represents the generational disconnect that has taken place in the wake of MySpace. Does Wired represent the younger, hipper generation, who only sees the fun and potential that this site has to offer? And if so, then does Fortune, from the school of older, established tradition, only see the dangers lurking in this new technology? And is that representative of the familial dilemmas that are facing us with this new interactive media?

Where's the meeting point? Nothing changes if there's no middle ground. We need to talk to our kids and reach some sort of common understanding.

Monday, July 10, 2006

Myspace Helps Mother And Daughter Reunite - Tech News - Playfuls.com - Science & Technology

This article describes a woman who found her daughter online after the child had been taken by her biological father over 15 years ago.

It's wonderful and it does show that there is positive potential for a site such as this; however, I cannot help but think of the flip side.

What is to say that parents, who have taken great lengths, to get their children away from parents who are physically and emotionally dangerous to the child's well being, that their efforts will not be foiled by what their kids have posted online? And that ultimately these families will not be put in greater danger?

What do you think?

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