Myspace - A Fun Place for Your Children or Not?

Myspace is a nice website to stay in touch with your friends, but it can also be a very bad place for your children. Many parents do not pay any attention to what their children do on the internet. They could be going to pornography sites, or they could be visiting a site that is devoted to children, such as Disney. Whatever the case may be, no matter how much you think you can trust your kids; you still need to check up on them. Take for example a situation that just happened to my family recently.

One of our little nieces is old enough to have a Myspace page, since the age limit is 14. She asked for me to set her up with an account, which is no problem because it was fine with her parents. I set her up as a 14 year old, which is her correct page. Obviously this was not good enough for her because I later discovered that she was being very deceitful and set up five other pages, where she posed as her mother on one, and also as old as a 19 year old. I brought this to her mother's attention, which she told me to delete them, but I couldn't without the passwords, etc. Then she called me back and said that she'd take care of it. In this situation there are two problems. First we have the fact that she is posing as her mother on one of the pages. The main problem with this is she is impersonating someone other than herself, but also as a much younger person than her mother really is. If someone was to find out that the mother was actually in her 30s, they could accuse her of being a child predator. The second issue is that she was posing as an older teenager than she actually was.

None of this has been corrected and she still has the pages open. This caused a huge family fight, but besides that we were looked down upon for "messing in other people's lives". Was I not supposed to care that my sister-in-law could go to jail for being a child predator? Was I not supposed to feel protective of my fourteen year old niece and be scared that she might get abducted by a deviant? My main message is this; it is the parent's responsibility to ensure that their children are safe. It is also not Tom, the creator of Myspace, to ensure this safety either. Parents need to take responsibility for their kids and stop blaming Myspace for their kids running away with a stranger, getting raped, or talking to people two and three times their age.

It is also not just children that pose as someone else either and lie about things. Adults can do it just as easy as children. How do you know that your child is not talking to a 50 year old pervert? How do you know that their friend Timmy is actually the same age as them? The internet opens up the possibility for people to be untruthful and make up unrealistic identities. It is the parent's duty to protect their children. The problem with children is that most are naïve. This means that they can easily, not knowing, post enough information about themselves to be tracked down quite easily. It is very easy to find out where a child is from because they normally tell where they are from, what school they go to, and what their hobbies are. Let's use an example of a certain town.

Let's say that your child lives in my town, Seminole, Oklahoma. If they answer the question on Myspace about where they go to school, or their mascot, they can easily be found. Let's just use for example that they go to school at Strother, which is one of our area schools. Your child might also have a picture of himself also. If they mention to an online "buddy" that they play basketball, all the person would have to do is go to the basketball game and pick them out. All of this little bit of easy to get information makes it especially easy for a predator to find your child. Now do you understand why it is important to monitor your child's internet activities? This is why it is essential for parents to educate their children on safety. I hope this saves some children and also educates the parents. Do not let this happen. Protect your children. This article was written by me because I care about the children that are around me. I do not want anyone go uneducated. This is a growing issue that needs to be addressed.