Monthly Archives: July 2011

Tip: using Google Alerts to monitor your child’s digital footprint

One of the big worries parents have with their kids online is the complete lack of supervision when it comes to material posted about them. The Internet is such a big place – how can we (and they) keep on top of pictures in which they are tagged? How can we know if someone makes a comment about them or refers to them on a website?

The easiest solution is to set up a Google Alert with your child’s name. This is an easy enough thing to do – you can literally Google “Google Alert” (or click on the above link) and follow the simple steps to filling in the details. You will need to set up a gmail email account if you don’t already have one, but you can set that to automatically forward any emails received to your active email address. You can create as many alerts as you like.

Use the name or nickname your child uses with their friends. Setting up an alert for Isabella Persephone Smith won’t be terrible effective if everyone knows her as Bella Smith. Google will send you emails with links to websites where your child’s name comes up.  Place the whole name in quotations (“Bella Smith”) so that you don’t get emails every time someone on the Internet uses the word “Smith,” which would be both annoying and ineffective.

Now some careful readers will note that this scheme will really only work for people with uncommon names. A Google Alert for “John Smith” or “David Cohen” or “Sanjay Gupta” or “Zhi Chen” would be utterly pointless. In those cases, you can finetune the alert by throwing in other particular search terms, such as the name of their school or the town in which they live.  You can ask that the alerts be delivered as they occur or collected and sent once a day (assuming anything comes up).

Use a minus sign (“-“) in front of any terms you want to exclude from the results (example: London -Ontario). You can also use a plus sign (“+”) in front of a term that you want matched as precisely as you type it, excluding spelling variations and synonyms (example: +Alissa to exclude searches for Alyssa or Elisa or Alicia, etc.).

You can also use “site:”  if you are particularly interested in a specific site.

“Alissa Sklar” site:facebook.com will return all of the publicly accessible mentions of my name on Facebook. Just typing in “Alissa Sklar” facebook will return all links that use both my name and the word facebook. It seems like a small distinction, but it can help weed out unnecessary results.

What do you do if anything unpleasant comes up? That depends on who sent it and where it was posted. You can generally request that tags be removed from pictures quite easily, and you can choose your method of response to any unpleasant postings. The Google Alert means you and your child can respond quickly, hopefully before anything gets spread too far. Kids already dealing with cyberbullying will need to be particularly vigilant, but for most kids, most of the time, this kind of knowledge is simply about developing an awareness of one’s digital footprint.

And that’s knowledge we all need, no matter how old we are.

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A Matter of Perspective – Letters from Israel

We’re in Israel on a family vacation for the next two weeks, a trip to mark our twin daughters’ 12th birthday and my mom’s 65th. A big year that required more from us than the usual birthday candles.
Coming here has been a really big deal for us, emotionally, financially, logistically. And although we’ve been planning it for a couple of years, we were a little bit nervous about bringing our children to a place so fraught with tension. It’s hard not to be nervous when you follow the news, when every fresh act of violence twists your insides. I understand that statistically we are in no more danger than we would be on an LA freeway (probably less in fact), but the images from the news get seared into your mind.
Anyhow, in our first two days here in Tel Aviv, I’ve learned a few things. The first is that we carry a very North American perspective on risk. People here (like people in most other places on the planet outside of urban North America) don’t get so worked up about mundane daily dangers.
No one wears a bicycle helmet, for example. Seatbelts seem largely optional in the front seats of cars (never mind the back seats). Kids run freely, seemingly unsupervised, in public spaces. Many more people smoke cigarettes. It’s safe to say our 3 children (along with 2 other pale, blonde kids with English accents we spotted yesterday) are the only ones on the beach wearing sun-protective swim shirts over their bathing suits. In fact, I haven’t seen this many people slathered with baby oil since the early 1980s. I saw one such shiny woman speed down the boardwalk on her scooter in a thong bikini (no helmet), cigarette in hand. I had to laugh, she looked so happy. (Still, I was glad she wasn’t my daughter!)
In fact, everyone seems much more relaxed. People are out with their small children at the cafes on the beach late at night. Women of all shapes and sizes wear bikinis with no self-consciousness. People generally seem fitter and healthier (all that smoking notwithstanding).
I can’t help thinking that these small daily activities must seem much less risky in the face of certain Israeli realities. All teens here spend at least a couple years in the army. Adults put in 30 days of reserve duty every year until late middle age. They’ve all faced some pretty tense situations. They’ve known loss in a way most North Americans have not intimately understood in many years.
They have also seen random, brutal danger in daily life. Arbitrary, life-changing violence on a city bus, an outing to a shopping mall, a nightclub, an evening stroll along a crowded street.
“Ein brera:” A distinctly Israeli expression to express how you carry on despite all this. There is no choice. Life is risky. Get on with it.
The news at home carries the stories of conflict, of course. But it doesn’t show the millions of people who go to work and school on a daily basis. Who relax in cafes in the evening, sell their wares in the markets, ride peacefully side by side on the bus. That’s what you see when you here.
The realities of life in the Middle East are never that far away. When was the last time airport security brushed your fingers for traces of explosives on a flight to Edmonton? Have you ever paid attention to an unattended briefcase? A young man oddly dressed in a bulky jacket in the July heat?
The risks we see at home come to seem like indulgences, like the extra perks we get for living in places like Montreal, Boston or Sarasota.
I’m not saying they aren’t worth our vigilence and care, just that it really is a matter of perspective. Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

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Peer pressure and bad decisions

Why do good kids make bad decisions when their friends are around? Turns out there’s a biological explanation for peer pressure. Not that it makes things like this any more comprehensible.)

Scientists at Temple University used MRIs to study the brain activity of 40 teenagers and adults playing a driving game in which participants had to decide whether to speed through yellow traffic lights in order to earn a higher score, even if meant crashing. Adults showed no difference in their playing when their friends were present, but the teens ran 40 percent more yellow lights and had 60 percent more crashes when they knew their friend were watching.

According to the New York Times Well blog:

“The presence of peers activated the reward circuitry in the brain of adolescents that it didn’t do in the case of adults,” said Laurence Steinberg, an author of the study, who is a psychology professor at Temple and author of “You and Your Adolescent: The Essential Guide for Ages 10 to 25.” “We think we’ve uncovered one very plausible explanation for why adolescents do a lot of stupid things with their friends that they wouldn’t do when they are by themselves.”

“All of us who have very good kids know they’ve done really dumb things when they’ve been with their friends,” Dr. Steinberg said. “The lesson is that if you have a kid whom you think of as very mature and able to exercise good judgment, based on your observations when he or she is alone or with you, that doesn’t necessarily generalize to how he or she will behave in a group of friends without adults around. Parents should be aware of that.”

What this means for parents is that we need to supervise our teenagers very closely. As we’ve seen, good judgment can be as much a matter of biological development as it is a personality trait.

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