Be careful of the company you keep. I’m sure your wise parents told you that as mine told me. And in one form or another I now tell my own children the same thing. There’s a lot of data showing that your friends, your social network, even your neighborhood can have influence on the choices you make and how you live your life. But can your friends cause you to be a cyberbully?
We’d all like to think that is because we select our friends to be similar to us. And that may be true. Often people select neighborhoods to live where they believe people will most be like them. But research shows that even undesirable traits can “spread” from friend to friend in our social circles. One example from a study of several years ago showed that having overweight friends could be correlated to weight gain on your part. That’s not causation – there’s no physical “virus” that slaps pounds on you but it’s possible that having friends with poor eating habits or living a sedentary lifestyle is to blame. If every social outing includes cheesecake or fries with dinner, you’ll see extra pounds appear.
In the cybercrime world, it’s possible that having friends who take shortcuts and live on the “edge” online can transfer those bad habits to you. At least this study seems to indicate that teens who illegally download pirated music, hack and cyberbully have friends who do the same. Is the cause “peer pressure”, or are kids with hacker interests more likely to friend each other? Researchers also point to a teen’s lack of impulse control. Teens don’t always recognize the true risks of cybercriminal activities and certainly don’t expect to be caught.
Parents should recognize that online risky behavior can be dangerous just like driving too fast, binge drinking and unprotected sex – the troika of modern parenting nightmares. Just because Junior is safely at home doesn’t mean his activities are benign. Make sure you are checking in with your teens to find out what they are doing online and use free parental control software, such as Norton Online Family, to keep them out of the online world’s most dangerous neighborhoods.