Chat room danger
I had a program put on our computer that would watch everything my 14 year old daughter did – she just seemed so secretive, it worried us. We found that she is having flirtatious conversations with men in chat rooms and several of them had invited her to get together. What do I do? I know she’ll feel violated if we tell her what we did, but I’m so glad we did – how do I approach this? What do I say to keep her safe without her hating us?
Teens have no idea how dangerous that is! Absolutely intervene now! Print out everything you have, set up a meet up with this guy through her account so he thinks it’s her and tell the police to meet you there!
We never allowed our children to have a computer in their own room for reasons just like this. The computer was always in the lounge room where everyone sits and still is. I know your daughter will be mad at you for removing her computer but it is a safe thing to do. Make it really hard for her to have any private conversations. Honestly, at this age, anything private, probably isn’t good.
We had this problem with our teenage daughter. My wife was good friends with a teacher at school and was confiding in her. I never realized how dangerous it was – the teacher told her horror stories of abductions, run-aways and other things that you never want to think about your child. She jumped right on it. She got the school to run a program all about the dangers of the internet. The school bought in a federal police officer and talked to the kids. He was really informative and rather scary. At the end of the presentation our daughter actually went up and asked the officer some questions and told him about the chats she had had with this man. As it turns out she was not the only one this man was talking to and he had been on the police radar for a while! I was beside myself. My daughter told us everything, she kicked this guy to the curb, and we have never had a problem with any of it since.