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Tackling Super Bowl Controversies with Kids

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Food for thought on Super Bowl Sunday… (original article- https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/tackling-super-bowl-controversies-with-kids) 

From cheating scandals to domestic violence to concussions to the halftime show, kids need to know your thoughts on the not-so-fun issues that may come up during the Big Game. By Caroline Knorr

Who doesn’t love Super Bowl Sunday? You’ve got the best teams in the league at the top of their game. You’ve got commercials that are entertainment unto themselves (and they’ve gotten progressively more family-friendly over the years). And you have license to eat as many hot wings as you want. Whether you’re a fan of the New England Patriots or the Atlanta Falcons, cheering on your favorite team as a family is part of the fun of the day. But some of the issues that have come up around pro football — from players kneeling during the national anthem to discussion of domestic violence arrests — can be confusing, and even scary, for kids.

If you’re watching with kids, you may want to avoid some of the trickier issues and focus on the fun stuff. But kids are pretty savvy, and since the Super Bowl is a live event, anything could happen. The announcers might mention the Patriots’ 2015 “deflategate” scandal, an edgy commercial or the halftime show could spark a debate, or rival fans in your living room could get a little heated. Before you know it, you’re caught off guard with subjects that you (let alone your kids) are not quite prepared for.

Hopefully, your game day experience will be one full of fist-bumps and finish-line dances. If any one of these issues arises, here are some questions and ideas to discuss with kids. Remember: This is a fun day, so no need to lecture. Your goal should be initiating conversation to get your kids to think more deeply about the stuff they see and hear.

Protest
In 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick earned praise and criticism when he kneeled during the national anthem to draw attention to the oppression of African-American people. Other athletes have risked fines to wear cleats that represent issues that are important to them. As a way of sanctioning players’ protests, the NFL lets them wear cleats that express their views during a special Cleat Week.

Ask your kids:

  • Do you think what Kaepernick did was an exercise in freedom of speech?
  • Do you think that because he successfully drew attention to the issue of racism that the end justified the means?
  • Do these actions encourage you to stand up for things you believe in?
  • Do you think players should only express their views through official forums such as Cleat Week and keep mum at other times?

Cheerleaders
It’s hard not to notice that there’s one group of people on the sidelines who are only half dressed. And what they’re wearing is pretty provocative. Sure, it’s tradition for football teams to have female cheer teams. But the blatant sexism of their costumes is pretty hard to defend.

Ask your kids:

  • Do you think it’s fair for the cheerleaders to have to wear such skimpy costumes?
  • Do you think wearing revealing clothes makes the cheerleaders get less respect as athletes?
  • What is the message that the game sends about women’s role in football?
  • Do you think the NFL’s efforts to make the games more female-friendly are effective? Why would they want to appeal to women fans?

Commercials
The Big Game is a huge promotional opportunity for advertisers. They go all-out on commercials that are memorable and will get people talking long after Super Bowl Sunday. Don’t feel guilty about enjoying them. Use them as a chance to help your kids understand the relationship between the broadcast and the commercials.

Ask your kids:

  • Why do companies spend so much money on Super Bowl ads? (Hint: The Super Bowl garners the biggest TV audience of the year; more viewers means more potential customers.)
  • Which were your favorite commercials?
  • Can you always tell which product the commercials are selling?
  • Do the commercials make you want to buy the product (or tell your parents to buy it)?

The Halftime Show
Leaving aside for the moment that this year’s halftime show is literally called the “Pepsi Zero Sugar Super Bowl Halftime Show” (see “Commercials”), the mid-game spectacle is a live event and anything can happen. Super Bowl 50’s halftime show starring Cold Play and Beyoncé incited controversy when many people perceived Beyoncé’s performance to be an anti-police political statement. This year, Lady Gaga is performing. Just let that sink in.

Cheating
Where there are games, there is often cheating. That should come as no surprise to kids. Both the Patriots (“deflategate”) and the Falcons (using prerecorded crowd noise) have been caught cheating. When the pros cheat, it’s confusing for kids who are taught to play by the rules.

Ask your kids:

  • Why would a professional athlete cheat? (Answers: money, fame, pride, a sense of being “above the law.”)
  • If someone else cheats, does that make it OK for you to cheat?
  • What should the consequences be for cheating?
  • Can someone who cheated ever be forgiven?

Concussions
In recent years, many former football players have been found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain disease tied to the concussions they suffered while playing. The NFL tightened its safety rules, but the game is still a risky contact sport. The movie Concussion starring Will Smith deals with the issue.

Ask your kids:

  • Football players earn millions of dollars, but is that enough to compensate them for the risks of the game?
  • How do you feel watching a game in which players might be taking hits that could hurt them in the future?
  • Would football be as much fun to watch if there weren’t tackles and other collisions?

Alcohol and Junk Food
Budweiser, Mountain Dew, Skittles, and Snickers — not exactly the breakfast of champions — are all advertising during the 2017 Super Bowl. Studies show that viewing junk food ads contributes to obesity and watching alcohol ads leads to underage drinking. You won’t be able to turn off every commercial you don’t want your kids to see, so help them resist being influenced.

Ask your kids:

  • Who made this ad? (When kids can identify the corporation behind the ad, it helps them separate their emotional reaction from the company’s money-making agenda.)
  • Who is this ad for? (Is it for grown-ups or kids?)
  • What is the ad for? (Sometimes it’s hard to tell because companies like to create associations — for example, Pepsi = cool — to make their product seem desirable.)
  • Are these foods good for you?
  • Was the ad funny, sad, happy? (Emotional reactions create sympathy and trust for a company, which is just a technique to get people to buy it.)

Pokémon GO: How Your Kids Can Play & Stay Safe

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Hope you are enjoying the summer! If your family is like mine, then your kids are probably out chasing down Pokemon around town. This is a great article taken from the Global Digital Citizen Foundation on how kids can play and stay safe at the same time. Happy hunting!

Pokémon GO: How Your Kids Can Play & Stay Safe

Many of today’s younger parents may remember playing a popular card game called Pokémon back in the early 1990s, where players collected different imaginary characters to trade and engage with other children in make-believe adventures. As technology grew, eventually these playful creatures found their way onto the Nintendo platform and today, adults and children alike are becoming overwhelmingly excited with the next adventure available on this platform.

Thanks to GPS and smartphones, Pikachu and other popular Pokémon playmates are now being tracked and collected in the real world using omnipresent handheld devices with Pokémon GO. This presents some obvious dangers and realistic threats with an increasing number of smartphone users who are disenchanted with the outside world when engaged with their devices, regardless of their age.

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Curbing Concerns

The worry for parents is increasing as more news reports are continuing to surface about injuries occurring during gameplay. Overall we shouldn’t be too concerned when remembering some important safety tips and advice we should be teaching our youngsters. It’s just a game after all, but it’s still a way for parents to teach their kids some important life lessons and bond with them during this critical time in their life.

Offer To Play & Participate

Whether they’re six or sixteen, parents should offer to play alongside with their kids inside these imaginary adventures. Not only will it help with the bonding process with adolescents, parents will have the opportunity to offer important learning experiences with younger players. Basic math skills and tracking their movements are the first two that come to mind for elementary players.

Connecting with adolescents can occur along with the excitement of trapping new characters when becoming more involved with our teens while playing the game. Instead of parents looking at our kids with a blank stare, for Pokémon players young and old alike, parents can share something with their kids when they get to know the game and its characters.

Limits & Boundaries

As with any new experience for kids, parents need to set rules and put boundaries into effect when it comes to game time. They shouldn’t wander too far from home, and should stay away from areas they’re unfamiliar with while keeping “stranger danger” in mind.

Child safety advocate Callahan Walsh, from the Center For Missing and Exploited Children, is working with the makers of Pokémon GO to help make gameplay safer for children and offers these four pointers for parents to pass onto their kids:

  1. Check with a parent before beginning an outdoor excursion.
  2. Always take along a friend and never play alone.
  3. Tell people “no” and don’t take any type of assistance from people.
  4. Inform an adult immediately if anything unusual happens.

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It’s important that parents instil a sense of urgency with their children to always be aware of their surroundings when playing. Besides the obvious threat of being injured when not paying attention, they could also wander onto private property or into unsavory areas.

With a little common sense and by following some simple rules and guidelines, there’s no reason kids can’t have fun in the make-believe world of Pokémon GO as long as they remember they’re still here in the real world. Good luck finding Pikachu and all her friends without getting into any problematic situations during your adventures.

Amy Williams is a journalist and former social worker, passionate about parenting and education.

6 Resolutions Every Family with Tweens and Teens Should Make in 2016

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Taken from: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/6-resolutions-every-family-with-tweens-and-teens-should-make-in-2016

6 Resolutions Every Family with Tweens and Teens Should Make in 2016

With tweens and teens spending more time on media than ever, these strategies can help to keep their experiences safe, productive, and fun all year long.

Caroline Knorr Senior Parenting Editor | Mom of one1/4/2016

If you’re feeling overwhelmed about managing your tween or teen’s screen time, you’re in good company. With 8- to 12-year-olds averaging nearly six hours a day on entertainment media and 13- to 18-year-olds racking up a whopping nine hours, according to The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, you’d be forgiven if you felt like throwing in the towel. But there’s good news:Parents who are actively involved in their kids’ media lives help them consume less, make better choices, learn, and understand more of what they’re interacting with. So even if your tweens and teens know way more about media and technology than you do, you can still help them navigate the digital world safely, responsibly, and productively.

Have the talk. No, not that talk. The one about being safe, smart, and responsible online. You don’t have to be an expert on Instagram or Call of Duty to give your kids a solid understanding of how you expect them to behave.

Help kids keep social media in perspective. Just because your teen is on Snapchat every minute doesn’t mean she’s really having fun. In fact, though 45 percent of teens use social media every day, only a third says they enjoy it “a lot.” However, teens whose parents talk to them about their social media lives report being happier. As with anything, social media has good, bad, and neutral aspects, but kids need parents to help them sort out which is which.

Encourage informal learning. Focusing on traditional academic benchmarks may not account for self-directed learning — the independent pursuit of knowledge, guided by kids’ interests, skills, and plain old curiosity. Studying guitar from YouTube videos, reading Star Wars wikis, and watching TED talks are all valuable screen activities that you can encourage this year (maybe after homework is done).

Have a media plan. It’s really easy for media and technology to overstay their welcome. This year, start off with a plan to maintain a balance and stay in control. A few ideas:

  • Create screen-free zones. Keep certain areas (bedrooms, for example) and times (such as dinner) off-limits to phones, tablets, TVs, and other devices so they’re reserved for rest and family time.
  • Cut down on multitasking during homework. Little distractions can add up to big misses on the algebra test.
  • Set limits. Everyone needs to disengage from their devices — adults included. But without someone to draw the line, tweens and teens may be tempted to text late into the night or play video games ’til they look like zombies. Establish appropriate boundaries and make sure you enforce them.

Encourage healthy skepticism. The ability for tweens and teens to think about the messages behind their media is more important than ever. Ads and content are increasingly becoming entwined, and studies show kids have a hard time telling the difference between them. Online stories are regularly unmasked as hoaxes. Even companies’ privacy policies are filled with legalese. Help kids to think critically about all the content they consume. Ask: Who made this? Who’s the audience? What are the messages?

Celebrate kids using social media for good. Across the world, regular tweens and teens who are tired of online negativity randomly pop up on social media with a positive message to share. Examples include Thomas Sanders’ Vines and a British teen’s antibullying YouTube video. This year, make a note to talk to your kids about the power of social media for positive social change.

Why some 13-year-olds check social media 100 times a day

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See the website for the full report and videos: http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/05/health/being-13-teens-social-media-study/

Watch a CNN Special Report, “#Being13: Inside the Secret World of Teens,” on CNNgo. Warning: This story contains explicit language.

(CNN)“I would rather not eat for a week than get my phone taken away. It’s really bad,” said Gia, a13-year-old. “I literally feel like I’m going to die.”

“When I get my phone taken away, I feel kind of naked,” said Kyla, another 13-year-old. “I do feel kind of empty without my phone.”

Both participated in “#Being13: Inside the Secret World of Teens,” a first-of-its-kind CNN study on social media and teens.

More than 200 eighth graders from across the country allowed their social media feeds to be studied by child development experts who partnered with CNN. This is the first large scale study to analyze what kids actually say to each other on social media and why it matters so deeply to them.

“We see a lot of evidence of, if not out-right addiction to social media, a heavy dependence on it,” said sociologist Robert Faris, a school bullying and youth aggression researcher who co-authored the study. “There’s a lot of anxiety about what’s going on online, when they’re not actually online, so that leads to compulsive checking.”

Read the study: (Warning: Explicit language)

Why are teens so anxious about what’s happening online? #Being13 found that it’s largely due to a need to monitor their own popularity status, and defend themselves against those who challenge it.

  • 61% of teens said they wanted to see if their online posts are getting likes and comments.
  • 36% of teens said they wanted to see if their friends are doing things without them.
  • 21% of teens said they wanted to make sure no one was saying mean things about them.

“This is an age group that has a lot of anxiety about how they fit in, what they rank, what their peer-status is. There is fear in putting yourself out there on social media and they hope for lots of likes and comments and affirmations but there is always the chance that someone could say something mean,” said child clinical psychologist Marion Underwood, the study’s other co-author.

The perils of lurking on social media

The study was conducted with eighth graders at eight different schools in six states across the country. Participating students, with the permission of their parents, registered their Instagram, Twitter and Facebook accounts through a secure server created by Smarsh, an electronic archiving company contracted by CNN. The study’s co-authors, along with their teams, analyzed an estimated 150,000 social media posts collected over a six month period. In addition, the teens also answered a number of survey questions about their use of social media.

‘If they’re talking about me, I’m going to talk about them’

The more teens look at social media, the study found, the more distressed they can become. The heaviest social media users admitted to checking their social media feeds more than 100 times a day, sometimes even during school hours. What’s more, some teens are so vigilant about those who might be casting them in a negative light, they follow the social media accounts of not only their friends, but also their enemies.

“I want to see what they’re talking about and if they’re talking about me. Because if they’re talking about me, I’m going to talk about them,” said Zack, one of this study’s teen subjects.

#Being13 also found that teens no longer see a distinction between their lives in the real world versus the online world. But they’ll still post online what they admit they’d never say in person.

“Go die. Stop trying to be popular. Holy s**t your (sic) ugly,” read one social media post sent to a girl in the study.

“On a serious level you are f**k bouta (sic) get your ass kicked,” read a post written by a boy in the study.

“Goddamn u dirty bitch u dirty bitch u dirty bitch,” read a post by another boy.

The level of profanity, explicit sexual language and references to drug use surprised the experts, considering the study’s subjects were only in eighth grade.

“I didn’t realize these kinds of behaviors trickled down. You see this at the high school level but these are kids, who I think of as children, and we saw a lot of adult content on these platforms,” Faris said.

Parents: Here’s how to stop the worst of social media

‘They’re sharing this stuff that was supposed to be kept private’

The adult content went far beyond the use of language. #Being13 found that even 13-year-olds are exposed to the sexualized side of the Internet. Fifteen percent of teens in this study reported receiving inappropriate photos, and those that did were nearly 50% more distressed than the rest of the students in this study.

“Receiving these pictures is upsetting, especially at such a young age, because it’s something you didn’t ask to see, it’s something you may have wished you did not open, but you can’t erase it out of your mind,” Underwood said. “It’s illegal, it’s worrisome, it’s scary, it’s dangerous, it’s loaded. If you tell an adult, everybody will get in a lot of trouble. So I think it puts them in a really tough position.”

In addition to receiving inappropriate photos, some teens in this study spoke about the prevalence of so-called revenge porn.

“What they like to call it is ‘exposing.’ It’s either, like, an ex-girlfriend or an ex-boyfriend, the majority of the time, and what they do is post … naked pictures of the person,” said Morgan, an eighth grade girl in this study. “They’re sharing this stuff that was supposed to be kept private between the two, and really shouldn’t have happened in the first place, but it did, and now they’re spreading it.”

Underwood explained that a break-up at age 13 can already be overwhelming, but to combine those feelings with this new, and malicious, form of payback can simply be devastating.

“To have the additional fear that incriminating pictures, that intimate pictures, are out there for others to see just adds to the shame and humiliation,” she said. “When they are hurt, when they are furious … unfortunately that’s just perfect ammunition.”

Parents ‘effectively erased the negative effects’

#Being13 also studied parents of the participating teens. Almost all parents — 94% — underestimated the amount of fighting happening over social media. Despite that finding, parents that tried to keep a close eye on their child’s social media accounts had a profound effect on their child’s psychological well-being.

“Parent monitoring effectively erased the negative effects of online conflicts,” Faris said.

Beyond discovering a number of posts and trends that parents might find alarming, #Being13 also found that social media can have plenty of benefits for 13-year-olds.

“It’s a way for them to connect with friends. It’s a way for them to see what people are doing. It’s a way for them to feel affirmed, supported, lifted up,” Underwood said. “Young people use social media to exercise positive leadership all the time.”

She cautioned though, “there is the occasional hurtful comment, the occasional painful period, experience of exclusion that looms large for most of them.”

By Chuck Hadad, CNN