Five Safety Tips to Help Keep Your Teens Safe on MySpace

How to Keep Your Children Safe on Myspace

MySpace allows teens to meet people from their area and keep in touch with one another. Write their own blogs, connect through forums, email, and join groups related to their interest. It's a world of online fun and opportunity.

Though, many parents perceive MySpace as a dangerous place for teens. The site can riddled with false profiles, online stalkers or worse. Parent's need to consider some important guidelines to help keep their children safe when using any using online social networking site.

1. Talk to your kids about why they need to use MySpace.

Even though it's fun to network online, the real world alternative is just a fun, if not more. MySpace can become addictive to the point where it can interfere with your child's homework. If they insist on keeping in touch with friends on MySpace make it clear how they should communicate with others, how they represent themselves online and how much information they should give out to the general public.

The idea is to inquisitively and lovingly ask your child what they intend to use the site for, not to start a war.
Kids should never lie about their age online, doing so will invite trouble. MySpace members must be 14 years of age or older. The site makes extra effort to protect its younger members and if members are falsifying information than it will be very hard to protect them from online predators.

2. MySpace is used by the general public.

Members should never post anything they wouldn't want the world to know about (e.g., phone number, address, email address, IM screen name, or specific whereabouts). Tell your children they should avoid posting anything that would make it easy for a stranger to find them, such as local hangouts, phone number and especially home address.

3. Remind your children never to post anything that could embarrass them later on or make them vulnerable.

Teenagers often take for granted just how public MySpace really is, even if their profile is set to "private." Anything posted on your Myspace blog or in their profile could come back to haunt them later.