News - Local/State

Thursday, May. 08, 2008

Library to offer parents Web tips

CHESTER -- Claudette Graham sends messages to children she knows who post inappropriate photographs or comments online.

"It's not ladylike," she tells the girls. "Is this what you want people to see you as?"

To her nephews: "You're not a thug. Take that off of there."

The Chester County mother of four has no problem with kids talking to their friends on the popular social networking Web site MySpace. But she said parents are responsible for supervising their children's activities, so she uses the site, too.

"As a parent, you have to know," she said. "That's your job."

The Chester County Library is trying to help local parents with that job.

The library will offer a class in "e-parenting" later this month to help moms and dads navigate the online lives of their children. Parents can sign up for the workshop now.

"It's not a class that's going to tell people everything that's wrong with the Internet," said Lisa McClelland, the course instructor. "This e-parenting class is to, No. 1, talk about helping parents work with children to make good choices on the Internet."

The Web can be a helpful research tool for school projects, and sites such as MySpace and Facebook can be great places to stay in touch with friends, McClelland said. But identity theft, cyber bullying and cyber predators are dangers parents should explain to their kids.

Academic problems such as plagiarism also can arise when children don't understand why they shouldn't cut and paste information from Web sites and claim it as their own work.

Other serious issues emerge when kids offer too much information about themselves or display provocative photographs on their personalized pages at social networking sites.

Several people organizing the class tell a story about out-of-town parents who got a crash course in MySpace when they saw a photo of their son wearing a leopard-print thong on his page.

They want to spare others that kind of shock.

"If parents do not have that knowledge about what's going on, what's out there, how can I monitor my children's access, then it's frightening," McClelland said.

The class also will teach parents how to filter some information on Web search engines and offer advice about where computers should be placed in the home.

Parents need to understand that the kind of parenting their mothers and fathers did isn't enough anymore, McClelland said.

"It's a whole new world," she said.

Library director Ann Ramsey said the idea for the e-parenting course came from a library manager in Great Falls who grew tired of policing kids' online adventures and suggested a workshop for parents.

The library only has one book about "e-parenting," Ramsey said, so having a workshop on the subject seemed like a good idea.

"You are your child's first and most important teacher," she said.

For parents such as Graham, that role means watching what her kids do online. She started using MySpace when her daughters, who are grown, were in high school. But she still keeps an account to track her 10-year-old son's activities.

While she's talked to other kids about their unnecessary photos and comments, Graham's children, who know she's watching, have never posted anything she objected to.

"MySpace," she said, "it's what you make of it that makes it either good or bad."