If your teenager child has been planning to use online dating, this safety guide can help you safely guide them through their foray into dating through online.
Online dating is a great new way for teenagers to meet potential partners and have a lot of fun. However, it is important to understand that misrepresentation on the web, especially with respect to online dating, requires that your son or daughter take precautions to ensure their safety. Communicating a few simple precautions will help your teenager have an enjoyable and safe online dating experience.
Protecting Your Personal Information
Teenagers often divulge much about themselves within a dating context. Their need to belong as well as their need to explore their sexuality makes them especially vulnerable to giving out too much personal information.
It is important to let your son or daughter know that they should not be giving out personal information such as their address, phone number, or high school until they know more about the person they are talking to, or until they have confirmed the identity of their chat partner. Let your son or daughter know that communicating a general geographic area instead of their specific location is safer and that they should be confident in telling their chat partner that they do not want to give out their personal information.
Helpful Tip: Teenagers as well as adults tend to reciprocate similar information when getting to know one another. For example, “I go to Wuthering Heights Secondary” which receives a similar response of, “I go to Bronte Secondary.” Acknowledging this fact may help your son or daughter avoid giving out their personal information unintentionally.
Avoiding Overinvestment in the Person
In the course of interacting online with their potential mates, teenagers will undoubtedly start developing attachments to their conversation partners. It is important to let your son or daughter know that they should avoid becoming too invested in this person until they have an opportunity to meet them in person.
The first reason is simple: People vary in their ability to represent themselves accurately. Additionally, people vary in how they interpret information. As a result, there is a lot of room for misinterpretation, especially if interactions are restricted to online messaging. For example, if someone writes that they consider themselves outgoing, to one person this may mean that they have a lot of friends, but to someone else, this may mean that they like going out a lot.
In order to prevent such miscommunications, let your son or daughter know not to keep their hopes up too high before actually meeting the person. Preparing them mentally for potential disappointment will help them deal with dates that turn out different from how they had expected.
The second reason is a little less intuitive: Overinvestment can result in impaired judgment on the part of your son or daughter. When we invest a lot of time and energy into something, in this case a potential relationship, we tend to not want to part with it. For example, if you have spent two hours waiting in line for the latest gadget, you are more likely to continue to stay in line than you are to leave because you have already spent two hours of your time and effort to secure your gadget.
To overcome the pitfalls of overinvestment, let your son or daughter know that they should not make any large commitments (such as declaring each other as boyfriend or girlfriend) before meeting their potential date. In addition, they should avoid extended periods of online messaging without actual contact because this also adds into overinvestment. The less investment they have prior to meeting the person, the more likely they will be able to part with them, if they turn out to be less desirable than predicted.
Chatting Beforehand
These days video and phone conversations are possible without giving out personal information. These methods can be especially useful for teenagers to “weed out” undesirable dates. Programs such as Skype or MSN allow a person to video-call or voice-call another person without divulging one’s personal phone number or address. For even greater anonymity, it might be a good idea to suggest your teenager create a separate account for chatting with potential dates (of course, limiting the personal information they use to create this separate account).
The benefit of phone and video conversations is that they give your teenager a better impression of their potential date. These methods allow a safe environment for your teenager to converse with their potential date, clarify any misunderstandings, and of course, determine if there have been any blatant misrepresentations (i.e., having inaccurate photos or lying about one’s age). These types of conversations also give a more realistic example of what it would be like to actually date their potential mate.
Precautions to Take for the First Few Meetings
Your son or daughter will eventually want to meet their potential date in person. Before they do that, you should go over some basic safety precautions. First, they should always meet in a public place for their first meeting (and not be persuaded to move to a more secluded location). Just in case the person turns out to be very undesirable, it is much easier to leave the situation and ask for help if one is in a public area.
Second, they should let someone (preferably parents, but responsible peers work as well) know when and where they are going and when they expect to be home. That way, parents or peers can follow up with your son and daughter to confirm their safety and, in some cases, give them a reason to leave their date early, if necessary. Lastly, it would be a great idea for either parents or peers to know who your son or daughter was planning to meet. That way, some advice could be given about whether or not their potential date is a good or bad choice.
Online dating can be a wonderful experience if the right safety precautions are taken. Equipping your teenager with the right information will help ensure that they have safer and more meaningful interactions with their potential dates.
