13 Percent of Teens Have Posted Naked Pictures of Themselves Online: Study Finds Parents Don’t Know How Their Kids Use Social Media August 27, 2009

It’s no surprise, parents can be clueless about how their children behave. I know I got away with a few things as a kid. However, what used to be relatively harmless behavior before the internet now has much broader and more lasting implications.

Online pictures, videos and conversations remain online and can easily be made public. What was once a private, fleeting moment of adolescent foolishness can now quickly become a lasting, public display that may impact on a child’s life well into college and even beyond.

Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that studies children’s media behaviors, recently conducted a poll of teenagers and parents. The study found that parents don’t know how their children use internet sites like Facebook, Myspace and Bebo, but also that children don’t know how closely they are being watched.

This latter point is interesting because it begs the question: if 82 percent of parents check their child’s online profile regularly, and less than one quarter of children think they’re being watched, how is it that parents are so clueless? Well here are the facts:

* 49 percent of parents reported that their child was 13 or older before they used the Internet unsupervised. However, only 14 percent of teenagers said they waited that long.

* 23 percent of parents thought their children log onto social networking sites more than once a day while in actuality 51 percent of teens use them more than that.

* Just 4 percent of parents thought their children use social networking sites more than 10 times a day; 22 percent of teens said they’re online at least that often.

* Only 2 percent of parents suspected their child had posted explicit photos or videos of themselves or others online. However, 13 percent of teens admitted they had done so.

While 13 percent is a relatively small number, that corresponds to the one of the most extreme categories of online behavior. More telling I think is that nearly 40 percent of teens say that have posted something online that they later regretted and that almost 30 percent shared intimate and personal details online that they would not have shared in public.

As parents, we should make sure our children understand that while it’s easy to post things online because you are in the privacy of you own home usually, that online information is far from private. Even on sites like Facebook that provide various privacy features, that information can easily and quickly become very public.

In addition, because internet postings can be almost permanently public, actions that kids regret can come back to haunt them in the future. It’s important to understand that for those 54 percent of teens that say they had posted derogatory comments about teachers and those 24 percent of teens who report “hacking” someone else’s social network account.

These type of youthful indiscretions used to dissipate on the wind. Now that they are etched electronically into the public domain, they have the potential to derail college applications or job offers.

51 percent of parents say they know their child’s online profile password, but only 14 percent of teens think their parents know that information. Spying on our kids is not the answer. We need to teach our children to have a healthy life online as well as off. We need to talk to them about the ramifications of their actions.