From Online to Offline Relationships of Teens: What Is So Scary?

Dec 9, 2015 | Parenting Tips and advices

Let’s admit this fact that most of the relationships made online don’t stay in the digital world only. People do meet their online friends in the real world. We are also familiar with the impact of social forums, and the dating apps. Every day, thousands of new people join and blend in. They make friends online. Now if we talk about the teenagers all alone, teens get into the romantic relationship and try to present the cool side of their personality on such forums. According to the Pew Research Centre 69% of teens who have met a romantic partner online say they have met them in person. Which shows how teens trust their online friends and get ready to meet them in the real world without thinking about the predators and the dangers. To give parents and the teenagers a wake up call on the hazards of dating with online friends, a guy named Coby Persin made a video. In the video, he recorded a prank in which he friended with three different girls, aged between 12-14, online. He catfished them by creating a Facebook profile and pretending he was a 15-year-old boy named Jason. A few days later, he asked each of the girls to meet him, either at a local park, at their homes or even in a van. See what happened next here!

This was just a trailer. There are thousands of thousand cases which talk about teen molestation, kidnapping, murder, etc. All this is the result of negligence. Parents today are not informed about their kids’ activities neither online nor offline. We recently talked about the facts revealed by police officials about the sexual predators. Keeping in view those, no parent would ever allow their kids join social forums, but this is no solution. The solution lies in coping with the situation rather than avoiding it. In my opinion, the first thing that a parent need to do is talking to their kids about the dangers of becoming friend with strangers, then they can opt for the digital monitoring tools such as parental control apps that keep them posted about what their kids do in the real life or in the cyber world. Using the app parents can monitor the social forums their teens join, websites they visit, the apps they use, contacts they save, places they visit, calls they make, receive or miss, etc. In addition to that, advanced parental apps such as FamilyTime let parents Watchlist suspicious contacts to get notified whenever the contact is made by either party. The app empowers parents to blacklist unwanted apps, remotely lock the phone and receive panic alerts from kids in case of emergency. They can also Geo-fence places so they stay informed when their kids leave the home, school or other important places etc.

Don’t Let Your Teens Get Trapped!

Teens are innocent. They cannot understand the reality of catfishers, online predators or the sexual assaulters until you explain them everything. Even though you make them understand these facts, you are supposed to keep a check on their activities too. Be tech-savvy and save your kids in time.