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Beyond Secrets and Lies
By Deborah Branscum
FamilyPC
Despite some bad press, chatting can be positive for kids
You can't deny the popularity of teen chat. Some 150,000 visitors check out America Online's teen Plug In area every month, while teens log 200,000 hours per month chatting in the popular Web site Talk City. What really happens when kids get together online? FamilyPC wanted to find out, so we talked with chat professionals and visited three chat areas.
"I think it's healthier than the telephone," said Nancy Schubert, a paid monitor for Talk City and the mother of a nine-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter who chat regularly. "They interact with a much larger group and get a global perspective."
Schubert's daughter Bonnie enjoyed chatting with other young people on Talk City so much that she, too, became a monitor. Bonnie says chatting has helped her open up and become more talkative. Thanks to chat, her typing has improved, and she's met people online that she never would have met otherwise.
Sounds good so far. But is chatting really so positive? Are kids swapping makeup tips or bomb recipes online? To find out, we visited kid chat areas at Talk City, America Online, and WebChat Broadcasting System.
Talk City
Talk City calls itself a "clean, well-lighted place" for chat. It stresses community values through well-trained monitors and close supervision of children and teen chat areas. Talk City has three areas for minors: Kid's Korner, for younger children; Youth Online, for kids 12 to 16; and InSite, for older teens and young adults. Adults and teenagers team up to oversee the areas.
Talk City makes its monitors part of the online conversation -- a technique that's unique among the chat services I visited, and one that I found appealing as a parent. That attention pays off in more focused discussion, more age-appropriate chat, and more structure for younger kids.
Last summer Youth Online held a two-week summer camp, an intriguing blend of mass make-believe (during a "hike" to see bears, for example), online games, and activities that kids could do in front of the computer (such as making paper airplanes). During the upcoming holiday season, Talk City will hold a Santa's Workshop where kids can write letters to the white-bearded one and explore Hanukkah and Kwanza traditions, among other activities.
America Online
America Online, the largest commercial online service, offers members many chat opportunities. Every time you click on the chat button within the Kids Only channel (Keyword KO), a brightly colored screen pops up with five safety tips for online behavior.
Teens can chat at Seventeen Online (Keyword Seventeen); Plug In (Keyword Plug In); the Teen Chat room (Keyword Teen); Spin Online (Keyword Spin); and a slew of general-interest areas also intended for adults.
An adult monitor oversees each children's chat room, according to AOL, while teen hosts do duty in the chat areas for their age groups. I wasn't impressed by my only foray into a Kids Only chat room, which is intended for children aged six to 12. In one of the three Blabbatoriums hosted by Nickelodeon, I found some mild profanity. One kid claimed a "pervert" had sent him an instant message, another kid tried to get advice on circumventing parental controls, and a third invited friends to a private (and thus totally unsupervised) chat room called Wildteens. (In truth, Wildteens wasn't wild at all, with the exception of a nude photo of Pamela Anderson.) It was the kind of stuff one would expect among teens (which many were), but not the sort of thing I'd want an eight-year-old to see.
WebChat Broadcasting System
WebChat Broadcasting System is a huge, freewheeling chat site that uses something called streaming chat mode. That means your Web browser downloads new comments on an ongoing basis. This approach makes a separate chat program unnecessary, but I found that it made the conversation difficult to follow.
Like AOL, WBS has six rooms for preteens, generally used by the nine-to-12 set, according to WBS vice president of business development Bayard Winthrop. There are several teen rooms, including the Hot Tub for the 13-to-15 age group, which can get a little risqué. Winthrop assured me that the preteen and teen rooms were monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That turns out to mean that a single individual oversees 15 to 20 chat rooms at one time. Parents can't block instant messages, but kids can easily notify monitors if someone is harassing them.
Before You Chat
Many parents, worried about safety, are reluctant to allow their children or teens to chat. That's understandable, but there are several ways to explore chatting safely.
Take advantage of the system's safety features. AOL and Talk City users can block instant messages, so you can prevent private, unseen messages between your child and a stranger.
Check out a chat room before your child does, to make sure you are comfortable with the chatting topics and styles the service allows.
If general, public chat rooms make you uneasy, consider creating a private chat room where your child and her friends can congregate after school.
Have your child chat with you and extended family members during regular online reunions.
Chat of the Wild
It was fun revisiting my youth, dropping in on various teen chat rooms and catching up on talk about bands, boys, and 'rents (that's us -- parents), and watching both subtle and obvious attempts to circumvent the terms of service at various sites. Chat rooms seem like far safer places for teens to practice their bravado than, say, speedy autos. While parents and kids need to be aware of the possible dangers that lie in the anonymity of chat rooms, chatting can be a safe and fun way for many preteens and teens to express their feelings.
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