Digital Citizenship in the Family

Expert Commentary for Family Online Safety Institute

Robert and Carole Hart-Fletcher create online learning communities for children, young people and adults. Over the past twenty years, they have provided rich learning experiences for over two million school children and their teachers in 44 countries. They were the inventors of pioneering learning communities including SchoolNet Global – the world's first and largest children's publishing community, which became the centerpiece of the Learning Zone of the UK’s Millennium Dome. They provided the ground-breaking GridClub Community (sponsored by the UK Government) and they created SuperClubsPLUS and GoldStarCafe, which they now license around the world. They have won thirteen major awards for innovation, online education and Internet safety, including the Bafta. They now run KidsOKOnline which provides specialist consultancy, design and development services to those who wish to create safe social learning spaces for children and adults. Other recent projects include a Social Network for children in the care of Barnardo's, J.K Rowling's Pottermore project and the Kids and Media Global Parents Network.

KOKO has been shortlisted for a Nominet Internet Award for Empowering Young People and Citizens for its work with Kids and Media.

KidsandMedia Australasia has now launched. Suzanne Barr, Regional Co-ordinator, is leading KaM in Australia and New Zealand - www.kidsandmedia.com.au - FOSI Editor

Digital Citizenship in the Family

Robert & Carole Hart-Fletcher

The Kids and Media Project

Kids and Media is the project of the charity, Barnevakten (literally ‘Child Protector’) founded in Norway in 2000 and led ever since by its evangelical President Øystein Samnøen. KidsOKOnline joined the charity just over a year ago. We are all dedicated to helping parents to guide and guard

Robert & Carole Hart-Fletcher: Digital Citizenship in the Family

© Copyright Robert & Carole Hart-Fletcher, 2011 1

http://www.kidsandmedia.com.au/

http://www.kidsandmedia.com.au/

their children and teens through the world of digital media. We are pro-media, pro-parents and pro-family. Our charter is nothing less than the United Nations Rights of the Child, which underlines children's rights to use media and to protection from harmful content and activity. Our mission is to see children and teenagers using media with safety and awareness.

Why focus on the family?

A great deal of time and money has been dedicated to helping teachers and children in schools to safely reap the benefits of digital media. At school, children have the benefit of a guiding adult and when online they have the back-up protection of the network firewall, with white lists and black lists of websites they can and can't visit. Their digital diet is carefully controlled and selected for age-appropriateness, learning and social value. But children's greatest use of digital media is in the home, in the family, where in many cases supervision and guidance are sadly missing. Many parents do not have a clue what media their children are seeing and know nothing about their children's experience and behavior online.

The challenges for parents

Let's look at the enormous challenges that parents now face, and consider their awareness of the dangers of online media and their knowledge of their children's media consumption and online behavior. (The research references are listed in the footnotes.)

• Nearly a quarter of children have seen porn online or on TV, but almost half of their parents don't know about it.

• The EU Kids Online survey found 14% of nine to sixteen year-olds have seen sexual or pornographic images online. Looking across all media, 23% of children have seen such content. 41% of parents whose children had seen sexual content said their child had not seen it.

Many children become sexually active at thirteen, fourteen or fifteen without their parents knowing.The YouGov Sex Education Survey of fourteen to seventeen year-olds found that one fifth of children surveyed had their first sexual experience at thirteen or under. Nearly a quarter of all fourteen year-olds and one third of fifteen year-olds have had sex. 35% of teens lie to their parents about levels of sexual activity.

Many parents are not aware of their children's sexual activity. About one third never discuss sex with their children and may not be aware that their children are learning about sex from porn sites. Parents of the digital generation grew up with porn restricted to magazines on the top shelf in the newsagent. Now the genie is out of the bottle and their children routinely use online porn. Some parents worry about its effects on children's sexual behavior and self image.



• YouGov found that more than a third of teens say they rely on getting advice on sex from friends, the internet, magazines and pornography. 58% of all teens have viewed pornography online, on mobile phones, in magazines, movies or on TV. This rises to 71% of the sexually active teenagers, 42% of whom use pornography regularly. More than a quarter of the boys surveyed viewed porn at least once a week (5% of them every day). Almost one third of teens say that sex is not discussed openly at home.

Children are downloading free music, ringtones or films from illegal sites and, as a result, one in ten have been exposed to offensive or sexually explicit material, and parents don't understand the file sharing process or how to tell the legal sites from illegal.

• The British Recorded Music Industry (BPI), found nearly a third of illegal music downloads delivered offensive content instead of the desired song. Another 41% received spyware and 39% downloaded a virus.

• A Netmums survey of 900 online parents found many families were exposed to inappropriate content and serious security risks, such as computer viruses and theft of personal or financial information, via illegal downloads. But while 92% of parents say it's important to encourage their children to access music, film and TV responsibly online, nearly 40% admitted they can't tell the difference between legal and illegal websites.

By the age of eleven, most children are lying about their age to get into un-moderated adult social sites where they can be bullied by their peers or groomed by predatory adults. The worst consequence would be for a child to meet a stranger who physically or sexually abused them. But ‘don't talk to strangers’ is ineffective advice when meeting new friends is such good fun for children. More worrying is that 5% of children have followed up an online meeting with a stranger with a real life meeting without their parents knowing about it. Now, if that looks like a small percentage, with around 12m children under sixteen in the UK, that's 600,000 children or 20,000 classrooms full of children going to meet a stranger unsupervised by their parents.

• The Child Wise Annual Monitor found that many UK school children spend time on social networking sites. A third of seven to ten year-olds use Facebook, rising to 71% of eleven to twelve year-olds.

• EU Kids Online found that 30% of European children have communicated online with someone they have not met face-to-face before. One in twelve children (8%) has met a stranger in real life, as a result of an online meeting, and 61% of those children's parents said they were unaware of the meeting.

Children are texting their friends under the bedcovers until the early hours of the morning and waking too tired for school. Some are getting abusive or sexual messages and half of their parents know nothing about it.



• EU Kids Online found 15% of eleven to sixteen year-olds have received sexual peer to peer messages, that is, been exposed to ‘sexting’. 52% of those children's parents were unaware of the sexting.

The time children spend online and connected is increasing. They start their digital adventure very young and it consumes more and more of their time as they grow. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said recently, “If you have a child, you'll notice they'll have two states: asleep or online”. For most kids that's not yet true, but many parents are concerned at the amount of time their kids spend looking at screens and the effect it might be having on their lives.

• Child Wise found that over 90% of UK children use the Internet. On average, children access five times a week and spend two hours a day online. Access is increasingly unsupervised in their own room, on their own laptop.

• The University of Bristol's Centre for Exercise, Nutrition and Health Sciences found that children who consume more than two hours of screen time a day run a higher risk of behavior problems. Most surprising, even if a two-hours-plus child spends his off-line time participating in sports activities, he still runs the same risk of developing behavior problems as an inactive child.

Many parents worry about their children's apparent addiction to the Internet, texting or gaming.

• A study by the International Center for Media & the Public Affairs (ICMPA), focused on students between seventeen and 23 in ten countries, including the UK, America and China, found that the withdrawal symptoms young people experience when deprived of digital media are comparable with those of drug addicts going ‘cold turkey'. Students reported that media, especially their mobile phones, have become an extension of themselves. Going without media, therefore, made it seem like they had lost part of themselves.

The Digital Generation Gap

Children do not see their online world as separate from what adults call the ‘real’ world - it's all part of their broad life experience. They can get completely lost in a video game or an online multiplayer game where they can become someone more powerful, special, beautiful and that fantasy world can be as (or more) important that the ‘boring!’ real world. Their online-only friends are as important to them as their school and neighborhood friends. To children, a text conversation or a mobile conversation is of no less value than a face-to-face physical meeting. Many parents find this is alien and difficult to deal with or even to talk about.

Our children are growing up in a new digital age culture which is largely hidden from their parents.



Many of today's children surf alone, watch TV in their own rooms, have private video chats with strangers, download films that parents don't ever see and listen to music that parents never hear. Many parents, although experienced with and perhaps working with computers, are bewildered by the digital world. Yes, they might know how to use Word and Excel and can operate the DVR, but few are involved with video games and multiplayer online games and they've no idea how to talk to their children about porn. Today's parents are dealing with a new Digital Generation Gap which widens every day as new digital technologies and new ways of interacting with media emerge.

Parents need help.

Kids and Media - Closing the Gap

We at KidsOKOnline (KOKO) came across Kids and Media over a year ago when the project, which started with a single website in Norway, had spread to Denmark, USA and the Netherlands. We were so impressed with their work that we joined them and have helped the project to expand. The new website in the UK is led by KOKO and edited by Rune Rasmussen and the Australasia site is led by ex-SuperClubsPlus leader, Susanne Barr, who is supported by a team of fantastic writers.

Kids and Media seeks to support, equip and empower parents and professionals who work with children and teenagers. We believe that parents need to be encouraged and empowered to take responsibility for their children's digital experience. That means:

• Knowing what good media content is available and suitable for their children.• Understanding the age-ratings for games and films.• Understanding of the benefits and risks in gaming, the web and mobile services.• Being ready to negotiate family rules and able to apply them consistently.• Getting down with their kids and teens to join in their gaming and surfing.• Steering their kids from the highly compelling but extremely violent or

pornographic games, films and websites to more suitable but just as compelling resources.

Our first aim is to inform parents, so that they know what technology and what content is out there for their kids and teens on Film, TV, Games, Web and Mobile. What's exciting, what's boring, what's uplifting, what's depressing, what’s inspiring, what's corrupting, what's fun, what's exploitative, what's downright dangerous?

Every year, on Kids and Media websites around the world, we publish reviews of about 300 PC and console games, online games, TV shows and films and advise parents on the age



appropriateness, entertainment, educational and social value as well as the potential dangers. The content is syndicated to all the KidsandMedia sites and localized for the regional parent audience, the local cultural and legal environment and the local game and film age-rating conventions. Kids and Media Norway also organizes and hosts Europe's largest non-commercial games convention.

We also help inform and advise parents about the issues and how to start the sometimes difficult conversations they need to have with their children:

• What do you do if your child is being bullied online?• What if your child is the bully?• How do you start a conversation with your child who has been watching porn?• How much time should your child spend on gaming?• What time of night should they put their mobiles away?• What's a normal amount of texting?• Should your 13 year old daughter have the Internet and a webcam in her room?• Has your child ever received sexually abusive messages?• What do you do when your child wants to meet a new online ‘friend’ in person?

We encourage parents by giving them conversation starters to open up discussion with their children; we advise them to get down and get active with their kids online and in the gaming world. We encourage them to negotiate family-agreed rules for media use and to be strong enough to enforce them.

The regional sites all offer practical and pragmatic advice on how to address the difficult issues. But originally it was a one-way conversation. KOKO has worked closely with Barnevakten over the past year and has created a new Global Parents Network to which all the regional site visitors are invited. Now parents can interact with peers, share their experiences, discuss their own situations, share the love and spread the pain. Now it's not just advice from us, but open discussion parent-to-parent and parent-to-expert on all the important issues around kids and teens using digital media. Parents can write blogs about their own family experience, join specialist focus groups on how to deal with games addiction, porn or bullying. They can also contribute to Media Watch forums which search for and review new technologies and content on games, film, TV, the web and mobile. And they can have their say by taking part in online surveys and research programs.

Parents – got a problem? Got a solution? You now have a place to share your thoughts.

We're really excited about the Global Parents Network and we have plans to create family educational experiences with and for parents, kids and teens. We want to build a place where those who hold the power over the media can hear the voice of parents and through them the



voices of children and young people.

We invite FOSI members and readers to join in the network – as parents and/or as helpful experts. Go to www.kidsandmedia.net. We're only just beginning, but we look forward to building a supportive community for parents.

Useful Links

www.kidsandmedia.netwww.kidsandmedia.co.ukwww.kidsokonline.comwww.pottermore.com

Research

• Report: EUKids Online. http://www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/EUKidsOnline/EUKidsII%20%282009-11%29/ParticipatingCountries/uk.aspx

• International Center for Media & the Public Affairs (ICMPA). Study conclusions:http://theworldunplugged.wordpress.com/addictions/conclusions/

• Childwise Annual Monitor: Digital Lives 2011. http://www.childwise.co.uk/childwise-published-research-detail.asp?PUBLISH=64

• BPI: http://www.bpi.co.uk/press-area/news-amp3b-press-release/article/new-bpi-report-shows-illegaldownloading-remains-serious-threat-to-britains-digital-music-future.aspx

• NetMums: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/210511• Personal and Environmental Associations with Children's Health (PEACH):http://

pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2010/10/11/peds.2010-1154.abstract• YouGov Sex Education Survey: http://sexperienceuk.channel4.com/teen-sex-

survey



http://www.kidsandmedia.net/




http://www.kidsandmedia.co.uk/

http://www.kidsandmedia.co.uk/

http://www.kidsokonline.com/

http://www.kidsokonline.com/

http://www.pottermore.com/

http://www.pottermore.com/

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/EUKidsOnline/EUKidsII%20%282009-11%29/ParticipatingCountries/uk.aspx




http://theworldunplugged.wordpress.com/addictions/conclusions/

http://theworldunplugged.wordpress.com/addictions/conclusions/

http://www.childwise.co.uk/childwise-published-research-detail.asp?PUBLISH=64




http://www.bpi.co.uk/press-area/news-amp3b-press-release/article/new-bpi-report-shows-illegaldownloading-remains-serious-threat-to-britains-digital-music-future.aspx






http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/210511

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/210511

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2010/10/11/peds.2010-1154.abstract




http://sexperienceuk.channel4.com/teen-sex-survey


