Cutting kids off web not an answer - researcher
 

The Daily Gleaner (Fredericton)
Thu Apr 7 2011
Page: A4
Section: Main
Byline: MOLLY CORMIER For The Daily Gleaner

Kids are attached to the Internet and that's not going to change, says a University of New Brunswick researcher.

Lucia O'Sullivan, Canada Research Chair in adolescents' sexual health behaviours, spoke to about 160 people at Fredericton High School on Wednesday night as part of the Univesity of New Brunswick's Ideas That Matter series.

The talk addressed both positive and negative changes in privacy and intimacy because of the Internet, as well as new phenomena such as sexting, cyber-bullying and easy access to pornography.
Most people in the audience raised their hands when O'Sullivan began her talk by asking how many people owned smart phones.

"Any random photo of people on the street shows half of the people on their phone. It's really rare to go into a coffee shop and not see someone on their phone, or at least someone reading a book quietly," she said.

Research shows Canada is in the top bracket for Internet and technology usage, and 98 per cent of young people access the Internet daily.

O'Sullivan referred to youths as "digital natives," meaning they've grown up in the digital age and it fits into their daily lives.

Such a reliance on technology is never going to change, she said.

"These technologies have become our typewriters, our clocks, our maps, our phones radios and televisions. We're never ever going to get that back," she said.

But raising a technologically savvy generation isn't necessarily bad news for parents, O'Sullivan said. While sexting - sending text messages with sexual innuendo or pictures - can be dangerous
if the messages and photos are distributed, it's still developmentally appropriate for teenagers to be interested in sex.

Compared to their parents, statistics show young people today are older when they have sex for the first time, have fewer partners and there are fewer teen pregnancies but not because they're accessing abortions.

"Those headlines don't incite moral panic," O'Sullivan said, explaining why sexting is more often discussed in the media.

Child predators on the web are also more uncommon than the media would have you think, she said.

In a survey of New Brunwick high school students, O'Sullivan found frequent users of text messaging had more sexual experiences compared to low users of texting. She said reasons for those results haven't been pinpointed.

The negative side of technology use by youths shows in other research: high use of texting and other social networking tools on the web can lead to increased social anxiety and weight gain, she said. Even the structural makeup of the brain could be changed.

During her concluding remarks, O'Sullivan addressed the parents in the audience.

"This was never going be the talk about recommending the best security system for your home computers, to lock it down so your child can't access," she said. "The best you can do is stay informed, stay aware, keep talking ... avoid lecturing and judging, and then get out of the way."

© 2011 The Daily Gleaner (Fredericton)