It is not just congressmen, like Anthony Weiner, or pop stars like Rihanna that are doing it. In fact, 1/4 kids admit to sending a nude photo of themselves before having left the house. So how do parents prevent their kids from the world of sexting and cyberbullying?
While there is no denying that technology has helped dramatically improve and speed up many aspects of our lives, it has also sped up ugly realities for kids, like bullying.
Teenagers these days are faced with more than being harassed in the hallways of their high schools. They have to deal with actual video footage of them getting beaten up, having sex or being bullied going viral on classmates' cellphones or worse, the Internet.
How do we safeguard our kids from the dangers of the digital world? How can technology help safeguard us from well, technology?
uKnow.com, a provider of parental intelligence systems, today launched uKnowKids, a powerful new service to help parents protect their kids against online predators, sexting, and cyberbullying while also supervising their children's digital privacy and reputation. uKnowKids is the first service to do more than simply show parents the messages their kids are sending and receiving; instead the service takes the vast amount of social data available online about a child and on the mobile phone, and translates it so a parent can quickly and easily act on it.
The founders know what they are up against. In fact, one of uKnow.com's co-founders, Tim Woda, prevented a real-life Internet predator incident that occurred with his own child. Woda's young teen son accepted a "friend" request on the Internet from someone he did not know: a "friend" of a "friend." Unfortunately, this "friend" turned out to be a child predator that had previously targeted and victimized a number of other kids he had "met" online, as Woda explains:
The digital world creates new parenting challenges for mom and dad. My son made the mistake of communicating with someone that wanted to cause him harm...it was a real wake-up call. Being aware is not the same as being engaged. Today's digital kids are online earlier, more often, and from more places than ever before. The tools of childhood have changed and so the tools of parenthood need to evolve as well.
Today kids can access social networking websites from a wide array of devices including mobile phones, gaming devices, music players, and mobile and personal computers. uKnowKids helps parents keep track and make sense of what's going on with the child's social networks and digital devices, enabling parents to understand not only what the child is doing, but when.