Digital Parenting and Safety Blog

I was recently invited to be a guest blogger at uknowkids.com and I am honored, inspired, and grateful. Once I recognized the genius behind uknow.com and uknowkids.com, I immediately saw the urgency, importance, and inspiration of this powerful company to help kids. Knowledge is potential power but action is power.

Celebrities often get involved in causes, and perhaps no cause is more worthy than ending cyberbullying.

As reported by Yahoo! News, the The Sioux City Journal's Sunday, April 22, 2012, edition, features a full-page piece with a very clear anti-cyberbullying statement. This follows in the wake of a gay teen committed suicide after being bullied. The Sioux City Journal's calls out the community to stand up and stop bullying. Getting much attention in the past few weeks, the move "Bully" documents the story of 14-year-old Kenneth Weishuhn Jr. who committed suicide after  intense harassment, including threatening cellphone calls and nasty comments posted online, after coming out to family and friends about a month ago. He died April 15 from what the local sheriff's office described only as a "self-inflicted injury." Kenneth was a Sioux City middle school student and we can only hope that such a thing will never happen again. With more attention and statements like the one the The Sioux City Journal made on Sunday, hopefully it wont. 

I've seen lots of material online and from my daughter's school about how to respond to cyberbullying. But if I can prevent it from happening in the first place, that's even better. All parents should know the top 10 ways we can prevent cyberbullying.

The recent buzz in the media is about the new movie BULLY. After failing to lower its rating from R to PG-13 the film is being released without a rating.

I have a weak stomach when it comes to watching kid-on-kid cruelty so I doubt I could make it through the film even if I wanted to see it, but BULLY is intensifying the ongoing national conversation on bullying and cyberbullying.

BULLY follows the lives of 5 kids throughout the 2009-2010 school year: 12-year old Alex, 16-year-old Kelby, 14-year-old Ja'meya, 17-year-old Tyler Long, and 11-year-old Ty Smalley. Both Tyler and Ty had committed suicide, so their stories are told by their parents.

1. Spreading rumors about someone online
2. Directing derogatory language or slurs at someone
3. Flooding someone's inbox with unkind emails or texts
4. Threatening someone, even if you don't really mean it
5. Trash talking a fellow online gamer
6. Forwarding (or creating) embarrassing pictures of someone else
7. Voting in an online poll intended to bash or rate others

My last post talked about 10 things you must teach your kids to do if they are ever the target of cyberbullying. One of them was to spend less time online – and here's why that's important.

Cyberbullying has the potential to hurt a victim in every aspect of life, including school performance. If a kid is being bullied, attempts to improve school performance without addressing the bullying are unsuccessful. One California bill aims to correct that.