Keeping Children Safe Online

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Total Length: 1220 words ( 4 double-spaced pages)

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Children Use of Internet

There is no doubt that American society and its kids get more and more connected to the internet and at a younger age as the years, technologies and generations drive on. As this phenomenon persists, there is a burning question as to whether using the internet makes children more socialized and/or more intelligent as a result. The answer is an important one because there is more and more use of the internet across all stripes of America's youth in the form of tablets, iPods, mobile phones, laptops and desktop computers. This brief literature review will pull in ten different sources that all refer to and speak of socialization and intelligence vis-a-vis internet use amongst children. The prevailing wisdom is that it either hurts or harms but the question is which. There is even the possibility that there are some good and bad benefits at the same time. While there are no easy answers, the mental and social health of our children swings in the proverbial balances.

Literature Review

The first source for this literature review covers the parental mediation of internet use and the associated cultural values across different countries in Europe. They looped in the "predictive power" of what they refer to as the Hofstedian paradigm. Funded by the EC Safer Internet Programme, the European Union Kids Online project aims to enhance knowledge of the experiences and practices of European children and their parents regarding online risks and safety. After all, adults using the internet are more aware of threats and the false flags that child predators and other people tend to put up online. There is also the relative ease with which this is done by anyone that wants to obscure or present a false face online (Mertens & d'Haenens, 2014). There is the need to "contextualize" and quantify the problems and issues that children do or might face online and what parents and authorities can, should and should not do to prevent questionable and problematic situations. There need to be preventative measures, awareness and limiting of opportunities for predators and other ill-intentioned people to do the bad thing (Green, Smahel & Barbovschi, 2014). Regardless, parents need to be intimately involved in the process (Ihmeideh & Shawareb, 2014). Further, the measures that are implemented need to be age-specifc. For example, sites that cater towards eight to twelve-year-old children should be constructed and should function a certain way while websites for fifteen-year-old should be done in their own different way (Blackwell Lauricella, Conway & Wartella, 2014).

One way to keep kids safe is an advanced understanding of the prior-mentioned preventative measures. Through the use of legal and ethical principles, online communities for children must be designed in a way that lends itself to learning, lends itself to safety of the children and lends itself to helping the child learn in a way that is effective.

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The ergonomics and features of a child-oriented website are obviously going to be different than those for adult websites. This could include the use of "help" features, colors and the overall menu layout (Zydney, 2015). Online communities for children need to be as seamless and lacking in disjointedness as possible (Manches, Duncan, Plowman & Sabeti, 2015).

Something that is a lot newer is using the internet for interventions in children, youth and young adults as it relates to anxiety, depression and so forth. So often, mental health interventions would be done in person by medical professionals and/or the parents of the children. Despite the skepticism that some may have, there were some good results for children (of all ages) that used online interventions but they noted that ground-based interventions should still be the more heavily relied upon source (Xibiao et al., 2014). When it comes to medical implications for children, there have also been interventions for children with insomnia, per a study that was published in 2015. It is noted in that study that sleep problems in children are a "common and cross-cultural occurrence" (Speth et al., 2015). It is noted that behavioral treatments are "highly efficacious," they also noted that internet-based interventions can be useful as well, not unlike what is noted above about other mental health issues like anxiety and depression (Speth et al., 2015).

Further, there is the idea that online children can gain better literacy and other skills. The implications for real-world practice are that many children use virtual worlds, virtual worlds offer children a range of opportunities to engage in literacy practices, the purposes for literacy in children's use of virtual worlds correlate with offline literacy practices and so forth (Marsh, 2014). A different study noted the internet skills of primary school children. There was a compare and contrast between those skills in those children and the formal, information and strategic internet skills that were gained as a result. The findings reveal that "primary school children possess sufficient levels of fundamental but not advanced Internet skills and, hence, might not be able to make best use of important opportunities the Internet has to offer" (Van Deursen, 2014). It is noted that children make their best efforts but they make very ineffective use of tactics and options to complete the tasks that they are trying to get done. As noted before, the site design needs to be different for children (Van Deursen, 2014)......

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