You really have to shift your focus over to the kinds of problems that the average kid is vulnerable to, and those problems tend to be more generated by kids and not by adults; things like cyberbullying, which is an enormous problem in this country ... .
Kids, particularly when they’re in middle school, have pretty fragile egos, and the wrong thing said at the wrong time in the wrong way can set them off in a really destructive direction ... .
It’s always more important than anything else that the channels of communication are open, that your kids feel that they can talk to you about things, and you feel you have some sense of what’s going on inside their minds and their hearts.
And it sounds like a cliche, but ... the Internet is ... a world that kids are going to travel to, and they’re going to travel alone. But if you can talk to them about it, you’ve got that much more of a leg up.
Rachel Dretzin
Ark Media
Documentary filmmaker, journalist, and parent
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