smart TVs and game consoles such
as PlayStation or the Xbox Live. A
common mistake parents make is to
put parental controls on computers and
laptops while forgetting that children
can access the internet through their
mobile phones and game consoles.
Next, do some research about the
tendencies of youngsters around the
world. Teenagers in Hong Kong tend
to follow the trends of their peers in
countries such as Australia, the UK
and the US. One source to look at
is Intel-owned technology security
company McAfee, which publishes an
annual report that examines online
behaviour and social networking
habits of youngsters. Its 2014
Teens
,
Tweens and Technolog y
report, which
studied more than a thousand eight-
to 17-year-old Australian youngsters,
found that YouTube was the number
one social site across all age groups,
while Facebook was the site most likely
to be visited on a daily basis.
Although Facebook’s terms and
conditions require users to be at least
13 years old, according to McAfee, 31
per cent of eight- to nine-year-olds,
and as many as 60 per cent of ten- to
12-year-olds, had their own profile.
Ethna allowed her elder son to have a
Facebook profile under the condition
he connected his profile to hers. In
return, she promised not to comment
on any of his posts.
Ethna has not installed any
parental control software in the home
yet, but says her boys’ iTunes accounts
are connected to hers, meaning
she has visibility of everything they
download. As for their internet usage,
she says her boys’ interests for now are
still reasonably innocent: “My older
one, the 12-year-old, is obsessed with
football, so most of his usage is on
FIFA. The other one is on Minecraft.”
The hardest part at this stage is simply
monitoring their screen time. “If they
had their way, they would be on [their
devices] all day, every day.”
Staying current
Sites such as Facebook, YouTube
and Twitter are familiar to almost
all parents and, although teens and
tweens might agree to connect with
their parents on Facebook, they are
almost certainly not spending all their
time there. Photo- and video-sharing
apps such as Instagram, Snapchat
and Vimeo, which allow users to
set up accounts under any alias, are
becoming increasingly popular as a
place to share content and comments
with various degrees of privacy.
One problem parents lament is
the ease with which children adapt to
new technologies. Mobile apps and
new social media platforms appear on
the market all the time, and parents
say they feel they cannot keep up. Two
examples of apps particularly popular
with younger audiences, but mostly
unknown to parents, are Keek and
Yik Yak.
Yik Yak, for example, is a
mobile app that allows users to post
comments anonymously and without
the need to create an account. The
posts are visible to other users within
a 1.5-mile radius. Yik Yak is active
in Hong Kong, but is particularly
popular in US colleges. It recently
attracted parental and media backlash
when some junior and high schools
in the US requested the service
be deactivated in the vicinity of
their schools after several cases of
cyberbullying and threats to schools
December 2014
71
