The Facebook Decision

Recently our almost-12-year-old presented us with a beautifully written entreaty on why we should let her get a Facebook (FB) account. This isn’t the first time it has been discussed in our house but it was the first time that we were ready to take the request seriously. In the past we have said "not until high school," which is still a couple of years away.  This time we were ready to negotiate.  In part because of her well thought out discussion points and partly because of the kid she is.  Thus far she has stayed out of the girl drama that goes on with this age group. She has been responsible with email and  understands some of the risks that exist in cyberspace. Just this year many of her friends have started accounts and right now she is worried about maintaining contact when she changes schools in a few months time. 

While I had a mental list of pros and cons, I still took to the internet to get an idea of just how other parents were making this decision and what factors were being considered.  I found many excellent tips on internet safety and helping your kids be smarter about social networking but I found nothing about making that initial tough decision to set up a FB account for you child.  For that reason, I am sharing our experience and decision. 

Why we wanted to say yes: 

• Social networking is a fun, everyday part of her parent's lives.
• FB presents opportunities for connection with relatives and friends who are far away. Many of our friends and family have accounts including my daughter’s 90 year old grandmother. 
• It makes it easy to share political ideas, news and humour with each other. 
• I already post family pictures visible only to my (carefully chosen) FB friends. I've gotten over any angst I had a decade ago about sharing photos or personal information to a limited online audience. 
• My daughter belongs to several respectable organizations that have their own FB pages including girl guides and youth group. 

Why we thought we should say no: 

• Her social skills, including conflict resolution and problem solving, are still young and developing. These are skills that we want to see greatly strengthened before unleashing her in the wilds of social networking. 
• She could become a victim of cyber bullying. Realistically she could also become a perpetrator. She is a well-intended kid but we can’t trust that she will always know how to handle herself when emotions get heated or someone zings her first. 

The decision finally came down to her age. 

All of those pros and cons will still need to be considered after she turns 13.  But for now, FB rules explicitly state that you must be 13 years or older to have an account. In fact, they provide direction on how to delete your under-age child's account or how to report an account of someone under 13.

I’m not a rule follower by nature.. more of a rule challenger actually. However as a parent I have always tried to take the approach that if we don’t think the rule is a good one or a fair one… then we need to challenge it through the appropriate channels, not just break it.

For several years now I have grappled with the idea that kids have to lie about their age to get a FB account before the age of 13. Often it is their parents lying as they help them to sign up. I’ve assumed though that those parents have rationalized that it is a stupid rule and who cares what Mark Zuckerberg thinks is appropriate anyway? Parents are in fact the expert on their own kids and should be able to decide if they think it is okay for their children to have an account. Right?

Yet I don't want my daughter to lie about her age.  Not now. Not when she is 16 and trying to buy beer. Not when she meets a cute older guy and wants him to think she is older too.

And yes, I was a teen and NEWSFLASH.... I lied sometimes! Probably about all of the above. No real harm came to me as a result. The vast majority of children won’t be harmed because they lied about their age to get a FB account. However, even when I lied as a teen… I was always secure in the knowledge that my parents would never have condoned it. There is safety in that boundary. While I hope I am raising a girl who will challenge injustice and advocate against rules that cause harm,   I don't want to be the parent who says it's okay just to ignore the rules and do what you want.

So I was grappling with this age rule.  I was curious about FB's rationale for not “allowing” children under 13 to have an account, at least in theory.  It is well known that as many as one third of FB accounts belonging to those 18 and younger actually belong to children under 13.

Here are a few recent stats from  Consumer Reports :

• Of the 20 million minors who actively used FB in the past year, 7.5 million—or more than one-third—were younger than 13.
• Among young users, more than 5 million were 10 and under, and their accounts were largely unsupervised by their parents.
• One million children were harassed, threatened, or subjected to other forms of cyber bullying on the site in the past year.  (2011)

So then I concluded… Mark Zukerberg actually doesn’t care. In fact, it is clear that FB actually wants kids on line yet wants to give the appearance that they are protecting children.  That is why they provide this safety information for parents  and these instructions for reporting underage accounts.

Digging deeper… I realized that the rule is in place because of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act  (COPPA). This is a US law enforced by the Federal Trade Commission . COPPA is all about protecting children under 13 from specific advertising,  having their private information made public or accessible for exploitation by marketers.

According to this article written by Tim Banks in January 2013, Canada contains no equivalent to COPPA.  However, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) seems to be developing some child privacy guidelines for advertisers and for websites that use tracking technologies. 

So what does all this mean for me, the parent?

I want laws to protect my child on line. I support COPPA and I am pleased to know that that on July 1, 2013 even further rules are coming into place that protect children's privacy.   I realized that letting my daughter have a FB account before she turns 13 essentially indicates that I  am willing to help advertisers gain direct access to her despite the laws in place to prevent that. Since I believe our children need more protections on line, not less, this approach made no sense to me.

It is important to know that:

• From a marketing perspective, FB wants your children to have accounts... and will target them with specific ads developed just for them.  You child under 13 will be have the privacy protections of any other minor between 13-17 but not the privacy protections developed for children younger than 13.
• Between the ages of 13-17 FB limits access to accounts in order to protect the privacy of minors
• Minors can not receive messages from strangers (unless they are “friends of friends”); unlike adult account holders, who can be messaged by anyone.
• Minors' photos and status updates are only visible to “friends” and “friends of friends” if they choose to make their accounts “public”. Their posts and pictures are not visible to anyone else.
• On the day that the account holder appears to turn 18 years old,  FB notifies the account holder that they are now considered an adult and their previous privacy restrictions will automatically change. Sounds good right?  But let’s imagine you set up a FB account for your 9 year old and you indicated that she was 13. Then on the day of her 14th birthday, FB will think she is 18. Everything on her page could become public and none of the safeguards in place to protect minors will apply to her account any longer. If she had previously allowed “friends of friends” to see her photos… those photos could be available to anyone in the world with a computer. She may not have the awareness to know she needs to change her settings or why that is important.

There are about a million big and little decisions we make as parents from the moment our kids are born or adopted into our lives. The Facebook Decision is just one and the answer that was right in our family may not be the right choice in yours, but I thought it might help to share some of the factors that we considered.

In the end, we didn't have to get in to a complicated explanation of privacy laws and ethics.  A few days after her proposal to us about FB... our daughter came home from school and shared that one of her classmates had her account "hacked" and a stranger had posted pornography on her pages. The same week there was a news report of a local 12-year-old girl facing criminal charges due to online bullying. Those incidents were enough to put the conversation at rest for a while.  

Eating Disorder Awareness

Today, February 3,  2013 is the start of Eating Disorder Awareness Week here in Canada. The US version of this annual event begins February 24. So this seems like a good time to delve into the topic on my blog.

For the past three years my primary occupation has been counselling and group facilitation  in a community based ED treatment program with adult women and men. With the support of an amazing agency and management team and together with passionate and brilliant colleagues,  I've had the unique opportunity of helping to imagine and create this program from scratch.   Prior to that, I spent 17 years working with teen girls, mostly as a counsellor and sometimes in other roles.  It was inevitable that I worked with body image issues, weight preoccupation and disordered eating throughout my career... these issues are far too common among adolescent girls. I also spent five years coordinating a prevention program that involved training volunteers to do body image workshops in schools.

With this history, some might see me as an expert in this field. While I learn new things every day,  I agree that I am more aware than the average person when it comes to eating disorders. I am aware of the symptoms and the potential outcomes. I know first hand the distress and despair that eating disorders cause an individual and his or her family. I teach others what may be most and least helpful when they want to help.  I read the research and consult with colleagues.  I've worked with people of all ages and in all stages of recovery or resistance to recovery.  I've spoken with their families.  I've heard their stories. I've worked closely with a woman who lost her daughter to an eating disorder and who herself has continued to fight tirelessly for services and awareness, in memory of her beautiful girl.

And then one day not so long ago, a serious and devastating eating disorder swept through my world in a deeply personal way.  A young woman whom I have loved since birth became ill.   I'll call her B. I saw the signs for a while... but was I right? B seemed thinner. She was clearly unhappy.  She was skipping out on the activities that she had been passionate about and no longer bringing her friends home.  Yet the rocky world of an adolescent has so many potential pitfalls... was I seeing something that wasn't there because I was hyper aware?  

B's family is nourishing, supportive, and very conscious of and attentive to adolescent development and challenges. Yet, early in B's adolescence, she had already suffered  serious consequences of alcohol use, had experienced dramatic conflicts with her parents and seemed to have lost the confidence that the younger B had displayed. I think we were all waiting for her to grow out of it. I stepped up ... bringing my skills to the relationship ...  talking to her whenever possible about her relationships, sexual decision making and being safe, how to access local teen clinics or counselling, and why it might be a bad idea to engage in some of the activities that her peers were engaging in. I talked with her about body image and included her in every self-esteem building opportunity I could.

Her parents noticed the body and eating changes too, yet there were so many issues, it was difficult to know what to prioritize.  B was in counselling for a long time but a developing eating disorder was not flagged as a critical issue. By the time that they, and I, were fully aware that a serious  eating disorder had taken over B's body and psyche, she met clinical criteria for anorexia nervosa with purging behaviours. She was admitted to a hospital day treatment program very quickly after her initial medical assessment. In other words, with all my awareness and knowledge, I missed this one and no amount of experience could halt the devastation in this family that I love. 

We now know that B's eating disorder was developing slowly over several years, taking over her body and brain.    It has been fourteen months since that diagnosis and B struggles. She has been in and out of treatment.  Unhealthy, too thin, depressed and often withdrawn, she nevertheless is functioning in the world... making plans for after high school graduation, partying with her friends and maintaining a part time job.  Still,  I often look at her and think of the title of a 1999 film, Girl, Interrupted.  In personality and physicality,  B is a shadow of her former self. We all miss the vibrant, creative, curious, outgoing girl. The girl who was deeply connected to her family and loved family vacations more than anything. There are glimpses of the real girl from time to time but she is often hard to spot amid the endless circular drama of eating disorder, depression and a series of poor choices and painful consequences.

Statistics indicate that one in ten girls with anorexia will die within ten years of onset. Sometimes death is a result of malnutrition or heart failure. More often it is the result of suicide. While B's family does everything they can to help her get well, there is only so much control a family has and any family's ability to intervene diminishes significantly when young women reach their later adolescence or move into adult hood. Prevention and early intervention are the best defences against the ugliness of disordered eating. Some parents aren't aware of the the early signs, or choose to ignore them or don't realize it is important enough to take seriously. After all, isn't body despair an expected rite of passage for girls in this body-hating culture? Isn't it normal and even healthy to be concerned about your weight and to always be on a diet?

There are no easy explanations here. Eating disorders are not just a result of cultural pressures, advertising and the diet industry although I've never met someone with an eating disorder who didn't start out dieting.  These illnesses are more complex than that.  Some people are just more vulnerable than others. Personality traits such as perfectionism, all-or-nothing thinking, compulsive tendencies or poor impulse control are factors. Family environments that are chaotic or over controlling, a traumatic experience or even a death in the family can be a trigger for an eating disorder to take hold.

Order this National Eating Disorder Information
 Centre Poster here

The theme for this year's Eating Disorder Awareness Week  in Canada is Talking Saves Lives.   

Would we have caught B's eating disorder earlier  if we had talked with her more about our concerns? Maybe... but then again B created a lot of chaos and distraction... giving her parents and other loved ones many other important issues to address.  What if her friends had been more aware and less entrenched in their own body dramas... would they have been able to help?  What if her therapist or her family doctor had known what to ask and what the red flags were?  

If you suspect disordered eating behaviours or thoughts are taking up residence in your home... start talking and listen hard.  Seek out medical help and counselling. If your child's doctor doesn't know about eating disorders or doesn't take your concerns seriously... find someone who will.  

For support, advice and referral information, use these toll free helplines:

• National Eating Disorder Information Centre  (Canada)  1-866-633-4220
• National Eating Disorder Association (USA)   1-800-931-2237

Want to read more?

My latest magazine article was just published in alive magazine in the February 2013 issue. In Eating Disorders: Increasing Awareness, I explores signs and symptoms as well as causes and underlying issues.  I also explain some of the latest buzzwords in the media:  drunkorexia, pregorexia and orthorexia.  The current issue is available on line through this cool new interactive program or you can pick up alive at your local natural health store.

You can link here to an article I previously wrote for alive called Not Just About Food: Recovering from Eating Disorders that offers hope through one woman's story of recovery.

For further information on signs, symptoms and how to help, check out  Eating Disorder Information For Families from the Manitoba Healthy Living website.

Help Your Daughter Cope When She is Left Out

Next week my daughter returns to school to start the home stretch of finishing sixth grade. Where we live, this is the end of elementary school and she will transition to a junior high or middle school.

I know the next six months will fly by. She will be prepping for Softball Season - yes, this is an official season at our house - and she will be making plans for grade six camp in June. We have decisions to make about schools and applications to submit.  Before long, I will be standing in the mall vetoing potential “grad” outfits. In the meantime, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the girl dynamics, friendship groups, and cliques that are becoming a more visible part of my daughter’s life. I know that many changes are ahead.  She has had the privilege of having a consistent, reliable, local friendship group for many years but everything will be different next fall.

My friends talk about the girl drama that goes on among their daughter’s friends. Who is “in” or “out” seems to change week to week and parents find their daughter coming home in tears over some real or imagined exclusion that may not be easily resolved.

Most of us experienced the power and complexity of cliques in middle school or high school but it can be shocking to watch these same dramas unfolding for much younger girls today. Social networking also adds another layer to experiences of inclusion and exclusion.  

Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography
 Creative Common License

Acceptance by a group is important to everyone, but some degree of exclusion is also normal at times; it is critical that children develop resilience and ways to cope with these exclusions . How girls handle these shifting group dynamics can be influenced by parents and other trusted adults. 
                                  
No matter how many friends she has, there will be a birthday party she is not invited to or a day when she feels all alone at school. I prepared some tips a few years back for my Dove Self-Esteem Fund Ask Lisa Column… and they feel more timely than ever to me now so I’ve adapted and added to them here.
 

Tips to help her cope with exclusion

• Acknowledge her sadness, disappointment and feelings of loss. Her feelings matter and her peer group is not a trivial part of her life.. some days it may feel like the most important part.  
• Explain that friendships ebb and flow over time and that occasional rejection is a normal part of life. Perhaps you can share stories of friendships that changed for you over time. 
• Help her notice her own growth and changing interests.  When kids are little they play with who is there... friends are whoever sits near them in the classroom, or the child next door.  However, as they grow they began to develop their own interests and attractions to specific personalities.  Just as some of her old friends may be making different friendship choices today, she too likely has been drawn to new people and that is a normal part of development that she may need help to recognize and appreciate.  
• Exclusion from an event may have no meanness or ill intent attached to it... kids are generally given limits for numbers of friends to include or are starting to pay more attention to the group dynamic as a whole and issuing invitations that take that in to account rather than inviting everyone they think of as a friend.  Help your daughter remember when she had to make similar tough choices. 
• If she is left out of a birthday party or other big group activity, help her make her own fun with a different friend who is also not included. This is an important act of self-care and helps her develop a coping skill for the future.  She certainly doesn't have to stay home alone feeling like she is missing out!
• Diversify her friendship groups. This can offer a safety net so that one group is not “all or nothing” in her world. Her sense of belonging will increase through friendships formed at camps, church,  school clubs, sports teams or through her other interests such as Girl Guides or a local knitting or biking club. 
• Teach your child to be a self-esteem role model. If she demonstrates empathy, respect and loyalty she may influence the dynamics of her social group. 
• Be a good role model yourself. Gossip and put-downs are just as harmful when you're an adult, and children learn what is acceptable by observing your relationships with others.  They also notice if you know how to have fun on your own and can choose widely from different friends with different interests. 
• If cliques or exclusion are a serious problem, become an advocate and work with other families and school personnel to initiate solutions.