Editor’s Notes: Talk to your kids about online safety
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The younger generation in my family is now 12, 13 and 14 years old. They are no longer "the littles." But, well, I have to ask ... have middle schoolers always been this ... weird? We weren't weird and awkward at that age, right?
(Truth be told, I was probably weirder.)
But no matter how big they get - no matter how smart and capable they are becoming, when I read a story about the dangers kids face today, I think of them. When I read about West Virginia Attorney General J.B. McCuskey's lawsuit against Snapchat, and the deadly consequences for two Mountain State kids who did not survive the predatory behavior McCuskey says Snapchat facilitates, I was horrified all over again about the world they'll have to navigate. It doesn't look anything like what we grew up in.
I was older than they are when teachers started talking to us about something called "the world wide web." I was in college before I had an email address. I was also in college before there was a cell phone affordable enough that my parents let me take it with me when I was driving at night. That thing barely got phone calls. If there had been a way to connect it to the internet, it might have melted.
I'll give credit to Bryce Tate's parents. They have taken their grief at what happened to their 15-year-old son and channeled it into trying to make sure other kids are safer than he was. Bryce was a Nitro High School student when he committed suicide after being targeted with a sextortion scheme by an individual on Snapchat. According to reports, Bryce was groomed by someone posing as a 17-year-old girl, with Bryce sending photos to the individual.
I'm oversimplifying for brevity, but McCuskey's lawsuit essentially says Snapchat's negligence made it easier for Bryce to fall victim to a predator. And Bryce is not the only one. The other child McCuskey mentioned in announcing his lawsuit was a 12-year-old girl. Twelve.
So while McCuskey and other attorneys general try to go after the companies that COULD be making their products safer for children, if they wanted to, what can the rest of us do?
Talk. Talk to your kids. Talk to them about making smart decisions online, starting with knowing who they are talking to.
Now, I know talking to kids isn't always easy.
For example, one of the former "littles" texted me the other day - out of the blue. All the text said was "I did it."
OK ... I wracked my brain. Did what? What did I miss?
Finally, I had to give up and say "I'm going to need more specifics than that."
It took two more texts for me to extract, "Made the basketball team."
And that was it. A quick response from me, and the conversation was over.
That's normal. For a generation of people who are given such a hard time for being chronically in front of a screen, they don't tend to actually want to use those devices to communicate very often or for very long with family, I'm discovering.
But if that challenge combined with being supremely uncomfortable starting a conversation that might have the word "sextortion" in it has you thinking you can skip this talk, tough. You can't.
It does make you think our parents had it a lot easier having "the talk" with us, though, doesn't it?
We can handle it, though. We have to. (I may, or may not be giving myself a pep talk with all this, too).
We owe it to today's kids not to shy away from anything that might give them another way to protect themselves from madness we never had to face.
Christina Myer is executive editor of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. She can be reached via e-mail at cmyer@newsandsentinel.com.