What should parents know about social networking sites?

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Nancy McBride
National Safety Director, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
www.missingkids.com  
1-800-THE-LOST

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) mission is to help prevent child abduction and sexual exploitation; help find missing children; and assist victims of child abduction and sexual exploitation, their families, and the professionals who serve them.

NCMEC was established in 1984 as a private, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization to provide services nationwide for families and professionals in the prevention of abducted, endangered, and sexually exploited children. Pursuant to its mission and its congressional mandates (see 42 U.S.C. §§ 5771 et seq.; 42 U.S.C. § 11606; 22 C.F.R. § 94.6),

The NCMEC serves as a clearinghouse of information about missing and exploited children, operates a CyberTipline that the public may use to report Internet-related child sexual exploitation, provides technical assistance to individuals and law-enforcement agencies in the prevention, investigation, prosecution, and treatment of cases involving missing and exploited children, assists the U.S. Department of State in certain cases of international child abduction in accordance with the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, offers training programs to law-enforcement and social-service professionals, distributes photographs and descriptions of missing children worldwide, coordinates child-protection efforts with the private sector, networks with nonprofit service providers and state clearinghouses about missing-persons cases and provides information about effective state legislation to help ensure the protection of children.

What should parents know about social networking sites?

In this video series, Nancy McBride, the National Safety Director for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children answers questions regarding personal child safety on topics ranging from the Internet, School safety, Holiday safety, and information about child identification. The Q&A provides helpful tips and tools for parents and guardians to help keep their children safer.

This expert: 93,309 views

This series: 11,427 views

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Transcripts

Host: What do parents need to know about social networking sites?

Nancy McBride: Social networking sites are extremely popular with kids today. It's a way for them to express their personal feelings and thoughts, to get together with their friends, to look at videos and pictures, to really interact in this environment, and it can be very, very positive. So, parents and guardians need to know what their kids are doing in social networking sites, how they operate, and how to safeguard their kids in this environment, so that they don t make mistakes and interact with people they shouldn t be interacting with.

One of my favorite stories is a mom who actually set up her own social networking page so that she could communicate with her kids and she could see what they were doing online and they could she was doing online. So, learn as much as you can about the social networking sites. Prohibiting your kids from going on them probably is not going to be effective, because they will find another way to gain access. So, set the rules, set the guidelines, set time limits, set rules on what could put online, what they shouldn t put online, and explain your kids what the ramifications are for their behavior and what is essentially a public environment.

The irony to me for many kids is they will put things online in social networking sites that millions of people have access to, yet they don t want their parent to see it. So, kids need to think about that, when I put something online, is this something that I would feel comfortable with anybody including my family members seeing?

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