Dave Paradis

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It used to be that keeping your children safe online meant monitoring their use on the home PC. Standard ways of doing that included keeping the family computer in a common area, restricting visits to certain websites via tools such as NetNanny and so on. Fast forward to present day and its now more of a rarity to see a child without some sort of digital device in their possession: a smartphone, iPod, tablet, laptop.[more…]

With children having these devices with them constantly, it’s important for parents to be knowledgeable about what the popular applications kids are using. Now that Mom, Dad, Grandma and Grandpa are on Facebook, tech savvy children have adopted new applications to communicate on where their parents haven’t yet adopted. I use the image here of The Fresh Prince from “Parent’s Just Don’t Understand” for some humor. I know full well how difficult it can be to keep on top of what your kids are doing without being overbearing. A good friend of mine recently said, “It’s up to us as parents to help shape our children, but then we have to trust what we’ve done in letting them flourish”.  While I don’t think it’s a good practice to stalk your kids online, I’d say it’s best to be knowledgeable about what they’re doing and who they’re communicating with, so that we can be parents who DO understand. At least a little bit better.

While not an exhaustive list, here are four of the most popular apps Tweens and Teens are using today.

Some things to note about these applications:

• You don’t need to have a cellphone to use these applications.
• All of these can be used with either a smartphone (iPhone, Android) or another device like an iPod, iPad, or other tablet devices.
• In order to open an account with these apps, all you need is an email address.
• There is no cost to purchase or use these applications.

 

Snapchat

www.snapchat.com

• Photo messaging service
• Users can take photos, videos and add text and drawings and send to friends
• Users set a time limit for how long recipients can view images (up to 10 seconds). After time limit, image is deleted from recipient’s device.
• No stated age restriction

Snapchat goes garnered a lot of press in it’s short lifetime due the controversy about the tool. The controversy is around the fact that this app is known as a sexting app what with it’s ability to have images auto-deleted within seconds of the recipient opening the file. However, there’s nothing to stop the recipient from performing a screen capture of the received image, thus creating a permanent copy.

 

Instagram

www.instagram.com

• Photo-sharing/social network service
• Users apply various filters to photos
• Ability to share images via Facebook and Twitter or on Instagram
• Accounts have followers who can comment on images
• Terms of service states users must be 13 years old to use this application
• There is the ability to make “Private” accounts where you can restrict who follows your account.
• Instagram was purchased by Facebook in 2012

 

Twitter

www.twitter.com

• Microblogging/Social networking service
• Users send and read text based “tweets” of up to 140 characters.
• Accounts have followers where you read other’s Tweets
• There is the ability to make “Private” accounts where you can restrict who follows your account.
• No stated age restriction

As I mentioned above, with Facebook becoming a tool that various generations within a family have adopted, while tens may have a perfunctory Facebook account, Twitter is a place they can speak freely. Twitter also has the ability to DM or Direct Message between users… essentially private messaging. Unless the account is set to Private, a user’s Tweets are visible to the world. A common practice for teens to obscure their identity on Twitter other than to their friends is to use a modified name using alternative characters such as “MIK3” for “MIKE”.

 

Kik

www.kik.com

• An instant messaging service
• Users can send texts, photos, voice messages
• No stated age restriction