Education News – Grace Smith
“Teenagers use various digital technologies in this day and age, and parents appear to be doing a decent job keeping up with them. The benefits of digital connection range from the ability to contact a child more readily and easily than ever before to improving kid’s ability to access educational information at the touch of a keyboard, says Monica Anderson for Pew Research Center. But along with the benefits of technology come concerns about who teens are interacting with online and what personal information they are sharing on the Internet…Marion K. Underwood, dean of graduate studies in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas and a co-author of the report “Being Thirteen: Social Media and the Hidden World of Young Adolescents’ Peer Culture,” said the best approach is to be an active part of teenagers online lives and then to gradually give more and more freedom as the teens mature. “Children who felt like their parents were monitoring their activity online were noticeably less distressed by online conflict,” Dr. Underwood said.”(more)