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Kids Want Parental Help With Online Risk, but Fear Parental Freak Outs


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Difficult to communicate.

A study by Pennsylvania State University researchers has found that teens rarely speak with their parents about their online behavior.

Credit: Highwaystarz-Photography/iStock

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University (PSU) conducted a study examining how teenagers communicate with their parents about their online behavior.

They found teens rarely talked to their parents about potentially risky online experiences, and parents and children often have greatly different perceptions of and reactions to the same online situations, such as cyberbullying, sexual exchanges, and viewing inappropriate content.

"Teens tended to be more nonchalant and say that the incident made them embarrassed, while parents, even though they were reporting more low-risk events, emoted much stronger feelings, becoming angry and scared," says former PSU researcher Pamela Wisniewski, who is now a professor at the University of Central Florida. She says this disconnect could lead teens to refrain from talking about situations that may upset their parents.

The researchers presented their findings last week at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2017) in Portland, OR.

From Penn State News
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Abstracts Copyright © 2017 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA


 

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