Early Social Networking Communities for Kids
This tweet and subsequent twitter conversation made me think about a story of my son and the early days of social networking sites for kids.
This story happened when my son was about 8 or 9, and now he’s 19. His sister, who is 2 and a half years older than him, used to frequent a site named girlz dot com (which is now a porn site!!). She and her cousins (I think, it may have been her step-sisters) would monopolize the computer with the girly website.
Kenny, the only boy relative at the time, hated the girly website. He proclaimed that it was not fair that there was a girlz dot com, and when it was finally his turn to play on the computer, he said loudly that he was going to boyz dot com. Boyz dot com has ALWAYS been a porn site. And the site was a pretty typical 90’s porn site, lots of rapid fire pop-ups with some very graphic stuff.
So Kenny loads up the site, and the girls are all right there, and they all start screaming when the porn site starts spewing its stuff all over the screen. Kenny was in a panic trying to close down windows. I think we turned off the monitor and sent everyone away.
It was actually pretty funny.
A new house rule was born that day: if you have never visited a URL, you must google it first to determine the content of the site.
September 12th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Gina - First of all, thanks for the Twitter shout out. My podcast this AM with my 6 year old son has caused a number of chuckles and more importantly, some interesting discussion over kids/the web/social networking.
Your situation with Boyz.com/Girlz.com is not a unique one (I like your new rule about googling first btw). One of the things that we have to continue to keep an eye on is how we keep our kids safe without putting up too many barriers. We should be in for an interesting ride!
Best,
Aaron | @astrout
September 12th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Aaron - the hard part comes when they are teenagers. They need to pull away from you, but need you guiding them even more than they did when they were toddlers. It’s very scary!
I am still friended on my son’s FB and MySpace because that was always the rule - you can’t have an account unless you friend me.
Him realizing I used the site to monitor what he was doing led to claims that I was the worst friend ever. I just reminded him, no I’m your mom not your friend. Now he loves freaking out his friends telling them I am his friend on FB - and then telling everyone his grandmother is his friend too.
The other rule I had was that he had to have met everyone on his AIM buddy list in real life. I would test him every so often, going down the list asking him “who is that”. Let me tell you, teenage girls pick some pretty bizarre and scary IM names!!!
September 12th, 2008 at 9:35 am
The website http://www.gurl.com/ is STILL a site for preteen & teen girls, mom.
September 12th, 2008 at 10:20 am
I knew someone would tell me I remembered the story wrong. Why did he go to boyz dot com then?
September 12th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
idk, bc he is weird?