Teens Talk Back: Meeting Peers Offline
When my friend Jake* was 16, he was talked into going on a double date with his friend, Chris, and some girls that Chris had met on the social networking site, Facebook. Jake told his parents that he was going to hang out with Chris, and "forgot" to mention the girls they were meeting. When they met the girls in the bowling alley, the girls looked completely different in real life then they had in the pictures on their profiles. After bowling and chatting for a little while, Chris and Jake realized that these were not the same girls that they had met online. They were completely different then their profile had described, and they weren't very interesting. So Chris and Jake went to "look for something in the car" and left the two girls at the bowling alley.
I told Jake that I thought that he made a bad decision to meet someone online that he had never met before in real life; he told me that he would never do it again. Jake realized that you can never really know who you are meeting online. He was pressured to go by his friend, and that probably made him think that it was okay to meet these girls. I don't think that he ever told his parents about meeting these girls.
Parents and guardians, I hope that this story makes you think twice about what your children are doing online and who they are meeting. I just keep thinking how lucky Jake and Chris were that these girls were not predators or some other creeps. Talk to your kids about their friends on social websites, and warn them to never agree to meet offline with anyone that they first met online without talking to you first. If your child insists that they want to meet with someone online, go with them.
Katherine - NetSmartz Teen Intern
Join us every Friday to read the opinions of our teen interns in the NetSmartz blog installment Teens Talk Back.
*names changed to protect identity of those involved
