Does your kid’s school have a social media policy?

Posted on August 10, 2011 by | 1 comment

What does that mean anyway? And why should you care?

A social media policy means the school (or board) is thinking proactively about what their students, teachers and staff are doing online. It means they are thinking through the guidelines for acceptable behaviour, safety and accountability. Some schools just ban social media (like Facebook) outright, but increasingly schools and school boards are realizing that they need to actively teach how to manage this important form of communication instead of sticking their heads in the sands and hoping it will all just…. go away.

Why should you care? Because your child will benefit from learning about social media from someone other than their friends (and maybe you). Because social media can be used in all sorts of creative, productive, exciting and challenging ways (not just to comment on what your friends are wearing). Because knowing how to use these tools effectively will certainly be a part of their future.

I spent the morning attending a meeting with the digital awareness committee at Trafalgar School for Girls, and I was so impressed by their creativity and forward-thinking. They have drafted a clear and comprehensive policy that emphasizes respect and safety. As we discussed a number of possible ways to stimulate and maintain a dialogue about social media with students, staff and parents, certain things emerged as particularly important:

  • Student involvement: giving them a voice and the power to get involved means they will be more likely to buy in.
  • Educating parents: parents need to know what this is all about, how it fits into what we know about adolescent development, and how they need to be involved.
  • Understanding how technology has changed what it means to be a teenager: sure, websites and apps like Facebook, Skype and Viber are cool, but they also introduce all sorts of new stressors. For today’s kids, the camera is always on. They spend hours cultivating and maintaining their digital personas. Old boundaries of privacy are not respected. Hateful and hurtful comments that would have been tossed out in the schoolyard and quickly forgotten are now hyper-public and enduring online. The usual adolescent anxieties around self-esteem and identity development are magnified — the stakes for every interaction have gotten higher.
  • Try to see past the panic: with each new technological leap, we tend to panic about what this will mean for our children, how it will destroy the moral fabric of our society, and how it will corrupt our girls and women (See Carolyn Marvin’s brilliant book, When Old Technologies Were New). I don’t mean to underplay the serious challenges we face, but we need to also maintain a clear vision of the fabulous opportunities these technologies open up for us.

There’s certainly a lot to think about, but this meeting with a group of bright, involved educators and parents left me feeling particularly optimistic.

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How you get unstuck – a repost you need to read

Posted on August 9, 2011 by | Comments Off on How you get unstuck – a repost you need to read

Sure, it’s a year old already, but this Dear Sugar column from TheRumpus.net is a beautifully written, powerful argument for confronting head-on the hard blows life sometimes serves up. Should be required reading for all teachers, parents, youth care workers.

(Thanks Julie, for bringing this to my attention.)

A selection:

Several years ago I worked with barely teenage girls in a middle school. Most  of them were poor white kids in seventh and eighth grade. Not one of them had a  decent father. Their dads were in prison or unknown to them or roving the streets of our city strung out on drugs or f**king them. Their moms were young used and abused drug-and-alcohol addled women who were often abusive themselves.  The twenty some girls who were assigned to meet with me as a group and also  individually were deemed “at highest risk” by the faculty at the school.

My job title was youth advocate. My approach was unconditional positive regard. My mission was to help the girl youth succeed in spite of the  unspeakably harrowing crap stew they’d been simmering in all of their lives.  Succeeding in this context meant getting neither pregnant nor locked up before  graduating high school. It meant eventually holding down a job at Taco Bell or Wal-Mart. It was only that! It was such a small thing and yet it was enormous. It was like trying to push an eighteen wheeler with your pinkie finger.

I was not technically qualified to be a youth advocate. I’d never worked with  youth or counseled anyone. I had degrees in neither education nor psychology.  I’d been a waitress who wrote stories every chance I got for most of the  preceding years. But for some reason, I wanted this job and so I talked my way into it.

I wasn’t meant to let the girls know I was trying to help them succeed. I was meant to silently, secretly, covertly empower them by taking them to do things they’d never done at places they’d never been. I took them to a rock-climbing gym and to the ballet and to a poetry reading at an independent bookstore. The theory was that if they liked to pull the weight of their blossoming girl bodies up a faux boulder with little pebble-esque plastic hand-and-foot-holds then perhaps they would not get knocked up. If they glommed on to the beauty of art witnessed live—made before their very eyes—they would not become tweakers and steal someone’s wallet and go to jail at the age of fifteen.

Instead, they’d grow up and get a job at Wal-Mart. That was the hope, the goal, the reason I was being paid a salary. And while we did those empowering things, I was meant to talk to them about sex and drugs and boys and mothers and relationships and healthy homework habits and the importance of self-esteem and answer every question they had with honesty and affirm every story they told with unconditional positive regard.

(click here to read from the beginning…)

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Is Internet addiction real?

Posted on August 8, 2011 by | Comments Off on Is Internet addiction real?

CC license codiceinternet

Pop culture has adopted the language of addiction in very casual, offhand ways. We speak of people getting hooked, of going through withdrawal, of needing rehab for all sorts of things, whether it’s Blackberry cellphones, Angry Birds or sugary soft drinks. Addiction has become a shorthand for talking about all sorts of things, from pure laziness to real impulse control.

But for most of these things, we know where the joke ends, and the real addiction begins. A destructive inability to stop using alcohol, tobacco or drugs is no joke. These things ruin lives, kill people and destroy families.

Lately, we’ve seen an extension of the language of addiction into grey areas, like sex, gambling, video games and the Internet. Can people really be addicted to these things in the true, psychological sense of the term? This is a very contentious issue in psychiatric circles, and the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) — the bible of the field that establishes the parameters for diagnosis of mental health disorders — has been negotiating these questions for the 5th edition due to be published in May 2013.

The current draft replaces he category of substance abuse and dependence with “addiction and related disorders,” which offers more wiggle room for including other items. It also creates the new category of “behavoural addictions,” which names gambling as the sole disorder. They did consider adding Internet addiction, but the experts on the judging panel felt there was still insufficient research on the topic. The solution was to put it in the appendix and recommend future study.

So what does that mean for parents and teachers of teens, who may be worried that their kids’ use of the Internet interferes with their lives? The evidence seems to point to some disturbing parallels with addiction. A new study by a group called Intersperience in the UK (reported here in the Daily Mail) found that 53% of Britons felt upset when denied access to the Internet and 40% felt lonely when they couldn’t go online. One respondent said not being able to access the Internet was “like having my hand chopped off.”

A related experiment at the University of Maryland  earlier this year (called The World Unplugged) challenged 1,000 college students in 37 countries to unplug completely from communication technologies, using only a landline and books for communication. Researchers recorded physical and physiologial symptoms comparable to withdrawal from a drug or smoking addiction. They reported feeling anxious, fidgety and isolated, saying that it felt like going “cold turkey” on a hard drug habit or being on a restrictive diet.

Interesting. The Mayo Clinic offers a list of symptoms of drug addiction, which we can adapt for our purposes here:

  • Do you feel the need to regularly use the Internet, daily or several times a day?
  • Do you fail in your attempts to stop using the Internet?
  • Do you make certain you maintain Internet access (wifi, smartphones, etc.)?
  • Do you ever spend money on Internet access even if you can’t afford it?
  • Do you ever do things you wouldn’t normally do to get access, like stealing? (For Internet, I would suggest adding missing significant amounts of sleep or meals.)
  • Do you use time on the Internet to avoid dealing with problems in your life?

They also suggest looking out for warning signs in teens related to drug abuse:

  • Neglecting schoolwork
  • Physical health problems – lack of attention to appearance, fitness, sleep, eating
  • Change in behaviour – becoming rude, insolent, withdrawn, closing themselves in their rooms for long periods
  • I would also add changes in social groups – Internet use can be isolating, especially when they are playing games that replace conventional forms of social interaction with virtual ones.

Now, I’m not a counsellor or psychologist, and these lists are intended to be thought-provoking and not used as checklists for diagnosis, but it seems to me that any activity that starts to interfere with our quality of life is a problem that needs to be dealt with.  The majority of our social interaction should be face to face, not online. There’s a fine line between making the most of technology, and becoming a slave to it.

If you think your teen’s time online is having a negative impact on their life, it’s OK to intervene. And if you have difficulty getting through to them, talk to a teacher, a guidance counsellor, their pediatrician or a social worker. Because our lives in the real world are ultimately the ones that count!

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