I have a blog on which I casually voice my opinions on everything from housework to television to politics. Completely inadvertently, I have found myself drawn into arguments and problems with a moral complexity that never occurred to me when I started out. I discussed a murder case once and ended up in a correspondence with a friend of the accused. I referred once, in the vaguest way and without naming names, to an argument I had with a friend. When she recognised herself being discussed on the Internet she was furious and we had a big fight.

Every time one of these things happened I was completely shocked. The Internet has a power beyond anything we can conceive. Anything you publish online can be read forever, by anyone, anywhere in the world. You can create a mountain of trouble for yourself and unintentionally inflict pain on someone else. I should be able to handle the complexity of this powerful medium yet I find myself struggling to cope with the challenges it presents. I’m supposed to be a grown up. If I have trouble with my online life, how can a teenager be expected to navigate the moral minefield of the Internet?

Imagine all the humiliations and miseries that you suffered as an adolescent. Imagine having to do all that again – except under the gaze of the always-online world. The drunken snog isn’t some embarrassing and transient event you hope everyone will forget about next week. Now there’s a photograph online to tell everyone you know and everyone you don’t, that you made a show of yourself. Do you cringe when you think of the self-pitying diary you kept as a teenager or the letters you wrote to a pop star or DJ? At least they are long binned. Think of the utter humiliation if they turned up online, maybe as the result of a Google search by a prospective employer. Perhaps a political view you held as a 16 year old from which you long recanted, is still out there on some silly website. The catty comment you made about a friend isn’t a gossipy aside in the pub –it’s in an email and she reads it and you’ve just lost a friend.

These are the kind of disasters your child is going to encounter online. You can’t keep them off the Internet – it’s here and you have to deal with it. What can you as a parent, teacher or friend do to help them out?

The first thing is: keep your head. Your teenager probably holds pretty firmly to the view that you don’t have a clue. If you do a “Here Be Monsters” line on them about the chatrooms, they’ll just throw their eyes to heaven. It’s the equivalent of screeching that all drugs must be heroin. The temptation is to spy on them. I wouldn’t recommend this as a general policy. If anyone read my texts or emails I would be outraged at the invasion of privacy. If your teenager finds out you are reading their emails, they’ll just create another address and not tell you about it. Looking over their shoulder simply drives them away. Having said that, I think the idea of allowing teenagers to have an Internet connected computer in their own bedroom is crazy. Keep the computer in the living room. That way you’ll know how long they are spending on it and if they burst into tears because they’ve seen something awful written about themselves, then you know about it.

After that there are really only two things you can do. The first is try and warn them, perhaps with the help of a school programme, about the different kinds of trouble they can meet online. Ask them how much of themselves do they really want to reveal online? We live in a confessional world – what are the draw backs? Just because we know about Paris Hilton’s sex life, do you think it’s a good idea that everyone knows about yours? Should they work out what things are said verbally, and what things are said online? Look at an email before you send it and ask yourself, what are the consequences of anyone other than the intended recipient reading this? How would they feel about that photograph being seen in ten years? Just because your child is robust and can absorb sarcastic and jokey comments, a more sensitive friend might be really upset. Don’t worry they’ll be bullied, be aware they could be a bully. In other words, encourage them to think about the implications of an online life. Make it a conversation, not a lecture.

The final thing is the strategy that I really hope I can effectively employ as my children grow older. Plead with them: if there is any problem that they have, any worry or any concern, please come to you about it. Make it clear that if they are gay, pregnant, slutty or frigid, you don’t care – you just want them to talk to you about it. Don’t worry about what happens when your child talks to strangers. If they can talk to you without fear of judgement or recrimination, then they won’t need to talk to strangers in the first place.
Sarah Carey
Journalist, parent, blogger