Washington, May 10 (ANI): In today's day and age, an additional role that every mother should play is that of being a cyber-mother. That is because instead of being nurtured through their formative years, today's teens are meandering their way through an unrestricted virtual world with disturbing experiences like cyber bullying, befriending unknown strangers, getting into relationships and accessing provocative content. Arming our kids with the information they need and talking even more openly about the risks involved and how to deal with them, is a key agenda of being a new age mother. Moreover, taking up this new role has become more critical and urgent for Indian mothers than ever before. According to McAfee's Secret Lives of Teens survey of over 1500 Indian parents and teens, there is an evident discrepancy between parental perception and actual reality regarding the online activities of Indian teens. The survey shows that while parental concerns prevail, teens do end up sharing more dangerous information online, contrary to their parents' belief. This divide is attributed to the fact that Indian teens are growing up as "digital natives", with increasingly active online lives but lack of parental assistance; substantiated through some of the following statistics: 70 percent of the surveyed teens believe that they shouldn't share their home address online but 40 percent of them still do. Correspondingly, only 21 percent of the polled parents believe teens would have actually done so. Although 31 percent of the surveyed teens have met their online acquaintances in real life, only 17 percent parents are aware of this. 20 percent of the surveyed teens access porn / nudity online willingly several times a day but 32 percent parents think teens willingly access it only a few times a year. 38 percent of the surveyed teens have witnessed cruel / mean behaviour online whereas only 16 percent parents are aware of this. Interestingly, 70 percent of polled parents completely trust their teens to tell them everything they do online whereas 58 percent polled teens strongly believe that they know how to hide their online activities from their parents. This suggests that there are some real threats for children online and responsible cyber parenting is the need of the hour. (ANI), Source: newstrackindia.com, Image: flickr.com
