How to Tell if Your Kids Are Being Cyberbullied and What to Do

http://ift.tt/24LrWeW

Secure Thoughts | Cassie Phillips

Cyberbullies are the new norm in schools across the world, and they aren’t always the obvious problem kids with bad parentage. The anonymity and distance the internet provides gives kids plenty of opportunities for cruelty without thought of retribution, and what’s worse is that your kid can bring the abuse home with them from school. Being a victim of cyberbullies can lead to anxiety, bad grades and even suicide in the extreme cases. You can’t allow this to happen.

There are ways to protect your home and your child. They aren’t perfect, and they don’t always work immediately, but a sustained effort from a dedicated parent can make a world of difference and turn the tide back on the bullies. You just need to know what to do with the technology you and your child use and know when to act.

Here are the steps you need to take to keep your kids from becoming victims of this epidemic:

Look for Signs of Distress

You know your children better than anyone. You know when something is seriously bothering them, and you know when they’re just having a bad day. Make sure to ask your kids or teens what’s going on. They might be a little guarded, but you can get a general impression with some time, and you can fill in the blanks with enough information.

Also make sure to ask about the other kids at school. Try to figure out whether cyberbullying is a common issue in the community. Information is key to getting to the heart of the problem. If you know what methods are being used to cyberbully your kids, you can develop a more targeted strategy. Remember that what might seem normal on the surface doesn’t have to be as it seems.

Take a Look (Depending on the Situation)

If you do suspect something is going on based on your intuition or your child’s changing and possibly apprehensive relationship with technology, it is your prerogative to investigate that technology and take a look at what communications are going on. Note that due to privacy restrictions and apps such as Snapchat that leave no evidence after the fact (a favorite of cyberbullies), you might not catch everything. You will be able to notice trends and see what your children are using on their computers, however, and that is often enough.

Teach Your Kids the Skills They Need

Once you know about the problem or suspect it could become one in the future, you should teach them how to deal with threats as they happen and what habits to follow. Start with the following:

• Screenshots and evidence are great to have, even if the intention isn’t to show it to authorities. It shows a history of the behavior. A phone can screenshot a Snapchat before it disappears and can show the exact instance of cyberbullying.
• Regularly blocking and reporting abusive people is a great step for your child or teen to take when dealing with people online. They don’t have the time to give second chances, and all but the most persistent cyberbullies will move on to someone else. Privacy is a fantastic defense, and cutting people off is a great way to get some.
• Engagement never works. A cyberbully won’t listen to reason because they don’t want anything other than interaction and the knowledge that they have power over your child.
• Websites that permit or even encourage cyberbullying should be avoided. There are better things to do, and the mainstream websites have protection tools in place. Teach them that they have agency over their technology, not the other way around.

Give Them the Tools They Need

A great kid can get through most of the hate thrown their way, but more threatening cyberbullies and the persistent ones should be blocked and then defended against. The following tools are cybersecurity essentials that will help you with your efforts against cyberbullies:

• Get a security suite for every computer in the house that gets any use. Viruses and malware won’t make things easier for anyone, and it’s not unheard of for cyberbullies to send such things to their targets.
• Consider getting a Virtual Private Network (VPN) so that your child’s activities can’t be tracked by anyone online and their location remains private as well. Combined with good privacy habits and practices, this can make your child harder to find online.
• There are apps and tools that can let teens take a snapshot of the abuse as it happens and anonymously report it to an adult. This removes some of the fear of retaliation and lets kids open up more about what is going on.

Take Direct Action if Necessary

Depending on the age of your children and the severity of the situation, it might be best to let your kids handle the problem for themselves once you teach them what to do. It will give them self-confidence, and it avoids the stigma of adult involvement.

Other times, especially those times where violence is threatened or the bullying is especially cruel, will require your intervention. Act quickly and contact the principal of the school and possibly the parents of the cyberbullies in question (bring evidence). You will have to use your best judgement, but protecting your children from harm is always the right option.

It’s up to you to prepare your child with what they need to know about protecting themselves online. It won’t be easy, but action is needed for the attacks to calm down. Support is out there for those looking for it, and the law is on your side.

Are you worried that your child is getting cyberbullied and wondering if a more specific plan of action might be needed? Have you dealt with cyberbullies in the past and have information or stories you’d like to share with others? Please leave a comment below so that the discussion on this important and dangerous topic continues.

by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Crayons Help Kids Learn the Periodic Table as They Color

http://ift.tt/1W46s7z

My Modern Met – Sara Barnes

There’s more than one way to memorize the elements on the Periodic table. You can turn them into a rousing game of Battleship or brighten up the pages of your favorite coloring book with Calcium, Potassium, and Titanium. Etsy shop Que Interesante adds some educational fun to art supplies by selling labels that match a chemical element with a wax crayon.

The pairing of chemical and color is done in a thoughtful and clever way—Que Interesante uses the “flame test” to determine the hue. This scientific procedure detects the presence of certain elements based on the color of flame produced. When put under this test, Lithium, has a red flame, so it’s coupled with a crayon of the same color. Likewise, Barium emits a green blaze and is matched accordingly. The goal is to help expose children to names of the elements so that they passively learn about them as they color.

Que Interesante sells sets of 24, 96, and 120 labels, depending on how scientifically detailed you’d like your crayons. They are all available in their Etsy shop.

This originally posted on My Modern Met

by MindMake via MindMake Blog

What Kids Need From Grown-Ups (But Aren’t Getting)

http://ift.tt/1O9UX6U

NPR – Cory Turner

Erika Christakis’ new book, The Importance of Being Little, is an impassioned plea for educators and parents to put down the worksheets and flash cards, ditch the tired craft projects (yes, you, Thanksgiving Handprint Turkey) and exotic vocabulary lessons, and double-down on one, simple word:

Play.

That’s because, she writes, “the distinction between early education and official school seems to be disappearing.” If kindergarten is the new first grade, Christakis argues, preschool is quickly becoming the new kindergarten. And that is “a real threat to our society’s future.”

If the name sounds familiar, that’s likely because Christakis made headlines last October, writing an email that stirred angry protests at Yale, where she is a lecturer at the Yale Child Study Center.

When a campus committee sent students a memo urging restraint in choosing Halloween costumes and asking them to avoid anything that “disrespects, alienates or ridicules segments of our population based on race, nationality, religious belief or gender expression,” Christakis wrote a memo of her own. She lauded the committee’s goals of trying to encourage tolerance and foster community but wondered if the responsibility of deciding what is offensive should fall to students, not their administrators.

“Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity — in your capacity — to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you?” Christakis wrote.

Many Yale students accused Christakis of being racially insensitive and called for her ouster. In December, she stepped down from her teaching duties, telling The Washington Post, “I worry that the current climate at Yale is not, in my view, conducive to the civil dialogue and open inquiry required to solve our urgent societal problems.”

What does Christakis’ role in the heated debate over racial insensitivity and free speech on campus have to do with her views on preschool? Surprisingly, a lot. I spoke with Christakis about her new book and the turmoil at Yale. Here’s an edited version of our conversation.

What is this phenomenon that you call “the preschool paradox”?

It is the reality that science is confirming on a daily basis: that children are hardwired to learn in many settings and are really very capable, very strong, very intelligent on the one hand. On the other hand, the paradox is that many young children are doing poorly in our early education settings.

We’ve got a growing problem of preschool expulsions, a growing problem of children being medicated off-label for attention problems. We have a lot of anecdotal evidence that parents are frustrated and feeling overburdened. So that’s what interests me: What is going on?

We have very crammed [preschool] schedules with rapid transitions. We have tons of clutter on classroom walls. We have kids moving quickly from one activity to another. We ask them to sit in long and often boring meetings. Logistically and practically, lives are quite taxing for little kids because they’re actually living in an adult-sized world.

Read More

by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.

http://ift.tt/1O62h3A

The New York Times – Sherry Turkle

COLLEGE students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught. Now they use it when they want to be both with their friends and, as some put it, “elsewhere.”

These days, we feel less of a need to hide the fact that we are dividing our attention. In a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of cellphone owners said they had used their phones during the last social gathering they attended. But they weren’t happy about it; 82 percent of adults felt that the way they used their phones in social settings hurt the conversation.

I’ve been studying the psychology of online connectivity for more than 30 years. For the past five, I’ve had a special focus: What has happened to face-to-face conversation in a world where so many people say they would rather text than talk? I’ve looked at families, friendships and romance. I’ve studied schools, universities and workplaces. When college students explain to me how dividing their attention plays out in the dining hall, some refer to a “rule of three.” In a conversation among five or six people at dinner, you have to check that three people are paying attention — heads up — before you give yourself permission to look down at your phone. So conversation proceeds, but with different people having their heads up at different times. The effect is what you would expect: Conversation is kept relatively light, on topics where people feel they can drop in and out.

Young people spoke to me enthusiastically about the good things that flow from a life lived by the rule of three, which you can follow not only during meals but all the time. First of all, there is the magic of the always available elsewhere. You can put your attention wherever you want it to be. You can always be heard. You never have to be bored. When you sense that a lull in the conversation is coming, you can shift your attention from the people in the room to the world you can find on your phone. But the students also described a sense of loss.

One 15-year-old I interviewed at a summer camp talked about her reaction when she went out to dinner with her father and he took out his phone to add “facts” to their conversation. “Daddy,” she said, “stop Googling. I want to talk to you.” A 15-year-old boy told me that someday he wanted to raise a family, not the way his parents are raising him (with phones out during meals and in the park and during his school sports events) but the way his parents think they are raising him — with no phones at meals and plentiful family conversation. One college junior tried to capture what is wrong about life in his generation. “Our texts are fine,” he said. “It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together that’s the problem.”

YANN KEBBI

It’s a powerful insight. Studies of conversation both in the laboratory and in natural settings show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on a table between them or in the periphery of their vision changes both what they talk about and the degree of connection they feel. People keep the conversation on topics where they won’t mind being interrupted. They don’t feel as invested in each other. Even a silent phone disconnects us.

In 2010, a team at the University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath put together the findings of 72 studies that were conducted over a 30-year period. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.

Across generations, technology is implicated in this assault on empathy. We’ve gotten used to being connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. But it is in this type of conversation — where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another — that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are.

Of course, we can find empathic conversations today, but the trend line is clear. It’s not only that we turn away from talking face to face to chat online. It’s that we don’t allow these conversations to happen in the first place because we keep our phones in the landscape.

Read More

 

by MindMake via MindMake Blog