How valuable are Adolescent 'Net Realationships

The Quality of Online Adolescent Friendships

Parents, grandparents, brothers, and sisters who feel guilty kicking your adolescent off the computer because there seems to be no real positive to online friendships, you are right. The guilt should be over. Children should be exchanging their time from behind a bright fluorescent computer monitor to underneath the bright warm sun with neighborhood friends. Adolescents claim that they have good friendships with people they talk to on the Internet. Well, they are simply wrong. Empirical evidence now shows that the friendships that youngsters try to formulate are not only dangerous but they don’t have any substance to them and don’t last long.
The biggest threat to any adolescent when trying to form friendships on the Internet, are predatory strangers. Some adolescents have been known to seek out stranger to form friendships; and should be a caution to parents. This fear may be justified: a recent U.S. survey has found that 39% of the adolescents interviewed communicated online with strangers (Peter, Valkenburg & Schouten, 2006). The simple fact is that Mayberry doesn’t exist anymore and our children are constantly at risk from people abusing the Internet. Valkenburg (2006) states young girls are most at risk, “Generally adolescent girls value interpersonal communication more than boys do and spend more time on than boys with online communication. Therefore, girls may also be more likely than boys to talk with strangers on the internet” (p.527). This problem of seeking out stranger is worse the younger out children are. As for age, we expect early adolescents to be more inclined than late adolescents to talk with strangers on the internet. The dramatic developmental transitions that take place in early adolescents, along with an occasional feeling of disorientation, make that period a critical time for experimenting with oneself, for example, by talking with strangers on the internet (Valkenburg et al., 2006). Children simply don’t grasp the pending danger that is in front of them every time they log on to the Internet. Valkenburg and company (2006) write, “Regarding adolescents’ frequency of the Internet communication, previous research has shown that adolescents who use the internet more frequently are more likely to form close online relationships. If you do hear your child speak of an online relationship her or she has built be very suspicious.
Online friendships have been studied and proved that they are far inferior to the ones your child has in the neighborhood or at school. Rubin, Bukowski & Parker (as cited in Mesch & Talmud, 2006) suggested, “Social interaction with peers provides a forum for learning and refining socioemotional skills needed for enduring relationships. Through interactions with peers, adolescents learn how to cooperate, to take different perspectives, and to satisfy growing needs for intimacy” (p.138). In a time of adolescent stage it is good that your child has a strong core of friends because they are the ones that are typically more accepting of what they want to do and intimate. Parents often get caught up in looking only toward the future that they get lost in asking the child what he wants to do in the present time. Mesch and Talmud (2006) agree as the cited, “adolescents friends are intimate and more accepting than parents, who are necessarily more orientated toward the future and more concerned with the potentially negative consequences of their child’s behavior” (p. 138). Online relationships aren’t and never will be as dynamic for children as face-to face relationships. Adolescents aren’t socially advanced to discover deep enough similarities with someone over the Internet. Electronic media has been weak in supporting social ties. “According to the “reduced social cues perspective,” computer-mediated communication (CMC) allows the exchange of fewer cues than face-to-face environments and therefore it is less appropriate for the support of emotional exchanges or the conveyance of complex information and a sense of social presence,” as quoted by Mesch and Talmud (p. 138).
Adolescents don’t have the social capacity to carry on a meaningful, intimate, and rewarding relationship over the Internet and it is dangerous and socially impossible if it is happening. Monitor an adolescent’s conversation in a chat room or another communication forum. It is plain to see that the quality of conversation is not such that occurs in face-to-face banter. Not only is the quality poor the subject often turns to inappropriate subjects. Bower as first witness to an adolescent conversation admits, “As conversation unfolds among adolescents on an internet message board, it rapidly becomes evident that it is not idle electronic chatter” (p. 27). Be cautious of what and where you allow your adolescent go on the Internet. No matter how much they argue they are their friends, how meaningful can those relationships really be?

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References
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Bower, Bruce. “Growing up Online.” Science News 169.24 (2006) 27-31. EBSCO. Arizona
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Mesch, Gustavo, Talmud, Ilan. “The Quality of Online and Offline Relationships: The Role of
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137-148. EBSCO. Arizona State University, Tempe. 5 April 2007 <http://www.asu.edu>.
Peter Jochen, Valkenburg Patti M, Schouten Alexander P. “Characteristics and Motives of
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Peter, Jochen, Valkenburg, Patti M. “Individual Differences in Perceptions of Internet
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Arizona State University, Tempe. 5 April 2007 <http://www.asu.edu>.