With social media and public servers for games, your child is likely to come across many different types of people. Just like in real life (IRL), they may come to be great friends. There is concern—and for good reason—if this is safe. A “catfish” is a term commonly used in popular culture to refer to someone who presents themself online to be someone or something that they are not. In our GKIS article “What You Need to Know About Online Catfishing,” we covered information about the rise of the term catfish, the psychology behind it, and certain red flags. In this article, we will cover how to best recognize catfishing and how your child can more safely meet an online friend once you, as the parent or guardian, have determined it is safe.
The Benefits of Making Friends Online
The internet displays a diverse range of people from many different cultures, ethnicities, identities, and lifestyles. Exposure to people different than themselves can be a great learning opportunity and help your child develop empathy and a greater perspective of the world. Dr. Tracy Bennett, Screen Safety Expert and Founder of GetKidsInternetSafe offers weekly parent and family coaching to help parents optimize the benefits of screen tech while minimizing risk. To learn more about her coaching videos, check out the GetKidsInternetSafe App. Sign up now and the first 30 days are free!
For kids who may be of a marginalized community themselves, like those who identify as LGBTQ+ for example, online contacts can be a lifesaver. Not only can kids have fun with their online friends who share similar interests and values, these friendships may also provide a sense of understanding, bonding, and representation.
In a 2014 study by Van Zalk and colleagues, shy adolescent participants who had online friends reported fewer depressive symptoms than those who were friendless.[1] Also, they found that having online friends didn’t distract the subjects from making IRL friends. Instead, online friends improved real-life friendships. This suggests that online friendships may boost self-esteem and social skills, so kids gain the confidence to seek friends offline too.
Making friends online may also be easier and more realistic for some kids, especially if they have trouble approaching new peers in real life. Further, if your child feels outcasted, they might search for an online community with or without your permission. So, preparing your child for safer online exploration may be your best option.
My Catfish Story
I’m a 23-year-old CSUCI intern for Dr. Bennett. In 2013, I joined an online friend group from a public Minecraft server. We would regularly participate in Skype group calls to play. All of us except one person—who I will call Sam—would regularly show our faces on video camera. Because we often saw each other, we felt we knew each other. But Sam refused to show himself on camera. Instead, he led us to believe that he was who he said he was by occasionally updating his profile picture.
Sam was really handsome and he eventually started dating one of the girls in our friend group. They tried meeting a few times, but something always came up where Sam had to cancel. We were in awe of his skills in the game and he gave us some assurance by going on camera although it was in a dark room.
Over a year into our friendship, Sam accidentally let the camera slip to reveal his face. Although it was a relief to see that we were, in fact, talking to someone our age, we were unsettled that the photos he was using were not him. Imagine the ways Sam could have been dangerous for us in slightly different circumstances.
How to Prevent Being a Victim of Catfishing
Verify Identity Through Social Media History
It is rare for a person to not have a digital footprint these days. However, with kids – they are often new users. If your child’s new friend does have social media, be suspicious if all their profiles are new.
Red flags for catfishing on Instagram might be if the person’s photos were all posted recently, if they are not tagged in any photos, or if the photos they are tagged in are from new accounts or accounts with under 30 followers.
To determine if a Snapchat account is new, look at the person’s Snap Score. A Snap Score is a feature shown on a Snapchat friend’s profile that displays the amount of live Snapchats the friend has received and sent. A Snap Score lower than 100 could indicate that the online friend recently created their account.
Other Snapchat Tricks
Snapchat offers a few features in addition to video calling. For example, you can send pictures and videos that have just been taken. One way to game this exchange is for the catfish to use their phone to take live pictures of preexisting pictures from another device.
A good way to challenge this deceptive catfish trick is to insist that the online friend send a personalized video that mentions your child’s name or a specific activity of your choosing. A few years ago, sending a selfie holding a sign with a name would have been satisfactory. But now with easily accessible editing software, written messages on paper or signs can be altered.
Opt for Video Chatting
Live video chatting can take place in many different forms through platforms like FaceTime, Skype, Facebook, or Zoom. We at GKIS especially like Facebook’s Messenger Kids. Dr. B is on Facebook’s Youth Advisory Team and has enjoyed having a part in its development from the beginning! She says she loves Messenger Kids because it doesn’t expose kids to ads and is the walled garden with parent transparency we’ve all been hoping for. Live interaction between two people makes it difficult to catfish. Even if the person tries to recycle prerecorded media in an attempt to appear live, it won’t look authentic because live chat conversation typically requires personal response.
Meet in Public
Unfortunately, there is no way to be 100% certain until you meet the friend in person. With deep fake technology, even personalized messages can be created.
If you’ve vetted your child’s friends online and you feel it is time for them to meet, meeting in public with your supervision is a good first option.
Meet their Parent(s)
Meeting the friend’s family can also help develop confidence in supporting your child’s new friendship. That way future plans can be run through the parents first.
Have Fun
Most importantly, have fun! Your child may have been waiting for months to meet their friend and now they finally can. You can also take comfort in the fact that you helped your child bring their newfound virtual friendship into real life.
Social Media Readiness Course
As kids get older, they must demonstrate knowledge, capability, and resilience to gain independence. We recommend our GKIS Social Media Readiness Course to help improve your tween’s or teen’s online experience by teaching the potential risks on social media and providing them with emotional wellness tools. As your teen works through the course, there are mastery quizzes at the end of each module so you can take track their knowledge-build course.
Thanks to CSUCI intern, Avery Flower for researching the pros and cons of creating friends online and co-authoring this article.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.
Onward to More Awesome Parenting,
Tracy S. Bennett, Ph.D.
Mom, Clinical Psychologist, CSUCI Adjunct Faculty
[2]Van Zalk, M. H. W., Van Zalk, N., Kerr, M., & Stattin, H. (2014). Influences between online‐exclusive, conjoint and offline‐exclusive friendship networks: The moderating role of shyness. European Journal of Personality, 28(2), 134–146. https://doi-org.summit.csuci.edu/10.1002/per.1895
Imagine that you’re running late to a new class where everyone has yet to meet each other. You sit down and note that the class is already full. But something else is weird with so many people in the room…the silence. This silence has become surprisingly normal due to our generation’s favorite accessory, headphones. These days it’s common to see most people out and about plugged in and tuned out. Is this a cool convenience or a problematic habit? Check out today’s GKIS article and see what you decide.
Excessive Headphone Use
In the university that I attend, most students have headphones in place until the moment the instructor says their first word of the lecture. The only people that are talking before that are the few people who’ve already established a friend group. The truth is, I’m so in the habit of wearing my headphones the idea of joining in on a conversation is stressful. My headphones are a sort of safety blanket that saves me from feeling awkward in new social situations.
My friends agree with me. We even admit that sometimes our headphones aren’t even on when we have them in! We keep them in to discourage people from talking to us or expecting us to respond. Sometimes it’s also a cover while we listen in on other people’s conversations. Headphone use is commonly a tool to socially distance.
We at GKIS aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed this phenomenon. BloggerClaire Hubble shared her story of being a self-proclaimed “headphone addict” in a blog post. In her post, she mentions the dangers of constantly keeping your headphones in, such as not being able to hear an oncoming vehicle or people calling for you. Hubble also brings up an important guilty pleasure we’re familiar with here at GKIS, podcasts.
For those of you who are not yet addicted, podcasts are like radio shows with multiple episodes that usually follow a theme or tell a story. Fans can subscribe to a podcast and follow their favorite podcaster personalities. Hubble said she loves podcasts as a way to avoid forced small talk. She goes on to share that without her headphones, she feels anxiously disconnected and even bored. She posits that headphone may be and up-and-coming addiction.1
Dangers of Excessive Headphone Use
Psychological
In a 1994 study on the psychological effects of Walkman use, researchers predicted that portable listening devices could potentially grow to be silencing technology. Silencing technology is the social and psychological separation of individuals. This study interviewed 36 individuals and concluded an impaired ability to interact socially with prolonged device use.2
A later 2005 study measured the use of headphones and portable audio use on college students using several self-administered scales and surveys. The 2005 study also found that frequent headphones use leads to social isolation and feelings of loneliness.3
Physical
Physical damage from increased headphone use has also become a growing concern. Potential health risks include:
Ear infections
Hearing loss
Tinnitus (ringing in the ear)
Headaches
Dizziness
Pain in ear
Hyperacusis
Excessive ear wax 4
Recommended Headphone Use
How much headphone use is excessive? According to the World Health Organization (WHO), anything over an hour a day is excessive for all listening devices.[5] Rather than eliminating the accessory altogether, steps can be taken to implement safe and healthy listening for your kid on-the-go.
How to Manage Headphone Use
In her book, Screen Time in the Meantime, Dr. B offers the following recommendations to help your family unplug:
Teach netiquette skills.
Introduce screen-free zones at the dinner table and other areas where a family conversation is common.
Decide on tech blackout times, like mornings before school and bedtime.
Start a conversation on safety with our free Connected Family Screen Agreement.
Safe Kid-Friendly Alternatives
Have you heard of noise limiting headphones? Noise limiting headphones are headphones that can be set to a specific volume the consumer decides.6 Researchers have concluded that noise-limiting headphones pass the “safe” listening range set by the World Health Organization (85 decibels) and were the favorite among the kids and teens in the study who tried them out.5 This is a quick solution if you know you won’t always be able to monitor headphone use but want to limit possible hearing or distraction injuries.
Special thanks to Aroni Garcia for researching and co-writing this article. If you liked the article, and you’re interested in learning more tips on how to break this trending habit, go over to 5 Back to School Tips for the Digitally Overtasked and Disorganized Parent to learn more about how you can keep on track with managing device and media time.
It’s happened again. Another hopeless teen chooses suicide possibly in response to cyber bullying, and this time it is tragically from her dad, a dad who posted a public-shaming video of Izzie Laxamana sitting defeated with her beautiful black hair blanketing the floor around her as he scolds her for “getting messed up.” What was she thinking jumping off the 48th Street Bridge? What was her dad thinking?
None of us will every know, but I suspect neither of them were thinking clearly. As a mother of three, psychologist, and creator of GetKidsInternetSafe I treat the suicidal teen and unthinking parent everyday. And before we rant self-righteously about what a monster this grieving father was, take a moment and reflect on your less-than-stellar parenting moments, those times you ranted, or humiliated, or hit. Recall your desperation, your fear, and your hope that this time your kids would actually listen. Because of this one impulsive intervention, maybe they’d steer clear of what was looking like a careless leap into the lake of entitlement, cruelty, or peril.
Let’s face it. Nothing makes us more crazed than our love for our babies, love that is tinged with shame and fear that we are not being our best parent, that we failed in our efforts to protect them from the dangerous things in the world. We let them watch that violent movie or allowed too much access to friends on social media who were poor influences. We did it because we wanted to make our kids happy. They begged and pleaded and it was a sweet opportunity to let them know we love them and listen to their feelings and desires. They told us to trust them, and we did. Or that time we went too far when they didn’t pick up their backpacks from the billionth time, threatening to retire as their parent or never let them do anything fun again, ever.
If you were really honest, can you say that you have the perfect formula of discipline and affectionate connection dialed in? Because if you can say yes, then your kid is either a robot or you are in deep denial. After all, the best way to teach our kids is to allow them, and ourselves, to fail – and recover, with humility, validation, and self-compassion.
The psychological research is squarely in favor of authoritative rather than authoritarian or permissive parenting. Being authoritative means being attentive, consistent, warm, strict, validating, and forgiving; not a tyrant demanding of blind obedience and not a friend accepting of all choices. Sometimes that means parenting with affection and humor. Other times it means laying down a consequence that your kids will be really angry about. But most often, it means gently guiding them through a protected path while letting them know you love them through it all, achievements AND mistakes. That includes sharing your own accomplishments and failures and limiting their exposure to content and people that pose risk or may come between you and your gullible child.
As I sit here, my heart aching from this beautiful lost child and her tortured father, I’d like to share my guess of the vulnerability this dad caved to that contributed to the loss of his daughter. Fear. In twenty years of practice I have learned to keep a keen eye out for the one thing that people seem determined to make happen, and that is to make their biggest fear come true.
I promise you it happens to all of us. Those who fear abandonment will challenge their loved ones to leave in the most ingenious of ways. Those who fear infidelity will accuse and threaten until their loved ones throw up their hands and stray. Those who fear disobedience will smother until survival depends on an epic reach for independence. Those who fear rejection will permissively allow until their loved ones to beg for boundaries.
If you are rolling your eyes in denial that you would fall victim to fear, I suspect you’re in the most danger. And if your wide-eyed and swallowing all that this article is offering, I suspect you may also need some support. Heck, if you’re breathing you deserve a hug today. Because life is hard and parenting well is even harder.
But rest assured that there is good news about fear. With patient reflection and an open heart, it doesn’t take much to identify the fears that threaten to take over the wheel. And from those insights, one can seek out the support they need to be better, do better. We can’t do this alone. If you worry you haven’t set a firm safety plan for screen use in your home, check out the GetKidsInternetSafe Screen Safety Toolkit to get started TODAY.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetYourKidsInternetSafe.
This news report states Izzy wrote suicide notes on her iPod, including one to her dad saying she loves him very much and he is not responsible for her actions. Apparently her dad did not post the video. Izzy gave it to a friend who posted it on social media. An investigation revealed that there were several contributing stressors, including a history of bullying and embarrassment about sending a selfie in sports bra and leggings to a boy at school:
