What does it mean to friend someone online?
Recently my daughter (third grade) has started learning to type at school. It's a Montessori program, so it's a pretty low tech environment overall, which I mention because I don't necessarily expect them to have a nuanced view of technology issues.
One of the typing programs they use is nitrotype.com, which adds a competitive gameplay element. However, it also has mechanism to friend another player. Friends can only communicate with stock phrases, so there's not too much "Internet leakage" beyond being able to choose a username.
I set it up for my daughter on her Linux Chromebook (I whitelist things I want her to have and everything else is blocked at DNS). Seeing her interact with it the first time, I realized that she spends as much time "adding friends" as doing the typing.
On its face, this activity is pretty harmless. But I am worried about the patterns it might be creating for her. I'm worried about her uncritically engaging with the dopamine hit of getting a new friend. Or how it shapes her idea of how many friends she has or where idea of her self worth comes from. Or what she thinks friends are.
So after that long preamble, here are some questions:
- How would you explain "friends" in this context?
- Would you distinguish them from other kinds of friends, either real or virtual?
- Would you attach a moral component to the activity? E.g. that it is good/bad or helpful/harmful
- How would you frame it to the teacher? Not so much in terms of whether or not they should do it in the classroom, but what kinds of conversations should they be having about the friends experience?
- If I'm asking the wrong questions, what questions should I be asking instead?
I'm really interested in seeing the perspectives people have on this. My own ideas are a bit murky, but I will put them down as a comment.
Looking up, it seems that fourth grade in US is 8 to 9 years old.
I wouldn't be too concerned with kids liberally adding people to the friends list. At that age, they're capable of some pretty sophisticated mental operations (I may be wrong, never had a kid that age). They are generally capable of distinguishing reality from fiction, so I believe they would be capable of differentiating between real friends and people who are only friends within a game. Essentially, the many meanings the word "friend" can have depending on context. Just make sure that they're engaging with a platform that is well-moderated and suitable for their age. I'd maybe have a conversation about it just to make sure.
I wouldn't worry too much about the game friend component per se, but rather about screen addiction as a whole. It's important to provide varied activities and social contexts for a child to engage with in addition to games and such.
Part of the question is: What is a "friend" to her? This site is calling these people her "friends", but they won't ever invite her to a birthday party, push her on the swings, or invite her over to see their new kitten. I don't know if she has a strong sense of what an online friend is as compared to a real world friend, but I think that's the fundamental concept; all of these different venues call this relationship "friendship", but the shapes of the relationships are very different.
I like this. Certainly as humans, we have many acquaintances. I play a lot of online games. There are many people I interact with daily or weekly that I'm familiar with and vice versa, but are we friends? No not really. I don't really know them.
But I also have other people I know who I initially met online and are now definitely friends. We have deep knowledge about each others' lives. We've done favors in the real world for each other, even though we're often great distances part. We've met in the real world on some occasions. We're absolutely friends.
Maybe school itself could work as a context. It's normal for kids to know a lot of other kids by name. But does that mean that kid is friends with all of them? Probably not. The same could be said here. These typing game "friends" aren't really friends. They're just people one knows, just like other kids in other classes or other grades.
I'll add some additional concerns and share how I've addressed the problem as a whole. US-based public schools, so YMMV.
At school, teachers have taken to using "friends" as a synonym for "classmates", especially at the pre-K to 1st grade level. And that muddying of language has definitely caused problems. "I don't like how Bob hits other kids, but he's my friend."
So, after that conversation (happened in pre-K), we started discussing (because 4/5 yr olds need a lot of repeating to drive it home over time) the differences between family, friends, and peers. And it boiled down to (roughly):
I'd have to disagree with this, as a woman who met online friends IRL when I was in my teens. (I've kept a good number of these friendships and some of them are my closest friends now! I'm in my 30s now.) With the caveat that it was always a friend group meetup, not a one-on-one meetup, and always in a public space for the initial meetups.
I'm not saying to just go ahead and trust anyone online, but I just don't think online friends are inherently less trustworthy compared to offline friends.
As a counter-case...my sister-in-law met a 23 year old when she was 14 on an online forum. 4 years of "friendship" later, he moves up, she moves in, and the rest is abuse history. Thankfully she got out of it.
The biggest problem is that it's pretty trivially easy for adult abusers to infiltrate online spaces of minors compared to offline. Not too many teens are gonna tolerate a 24 year old creepin on them in the mall, but its pretty easy for that 24 yr old to hang out in a discord server.
Not saying you're wrong of course, everyone is different. But if I'm tossing out generalized advice, that's what I'll give. Let your online friendships bloom in you're 30's when you're too tired to leave the house lol.
This is harsh, but:
I'm sorry but that's the full stop of figuring out what went wrong - that was going on for four years and her parents didn't give her a framework of this being a dangerous situation, internet be damned? These things happen on or off the internet. Kids grow up on the internet now. They will find ways around it if you don't let them or become overbearing about this.
I just hung out with friends yesterday, who were at my wedding, who are in a relationship with each other, and we all met 19 years ago on GameFAQs. My kid will be on the internet, is going to meet people somehow, and denying him a social channel with friends or ignoring that I found my own ways around filters from my paranoid parents back in the day is straight denial. I'm not going to say he can't, and I'm not going to let him run free on 4chan, but if he wants to meet up with someone nearby then he should have a frame of reference for what appropriate relationships look like and trust that I would be willing to help him pursue those safely.
I'm sure that fits wonderfully into a modern college social life.
The parents did, and she ignored them, "because she was in love."
I'm not saying I'm banning my kids from the net. Just that internet friends are different from real friends, and they should wait until they're older before mixing them.
I'm not particularly convinced that this is as big a worry as you're framing it as, at least not in the way you describe. I played kids online games with "friends" systems when I was her age, and I was completely capable of distinguishing between friends in a game and real life friends. It didn't even phase me that they may be the same thing. I think you and others here may be getting hung up on the word "friend" here when it's not really the issue.
I think the more valuable discussions to have are how to safely interact with others online. It doesn't actually matter how close to a "real friend" these online friends are -- she may perceive that differently than you do anyway. Regardless of how "real" they are, it's important to teach her what's safe to share online and what to avoid. It sounds like this website has pretty limited ability to communicate anyway, so probably not much worry there, but obviously you won't be able to keep her locked into a whitelist forever. But the tools she needs to learn about trusting people and sharing things aren't even necessarily limited to people online -- people she knows in real life can also groom her online or in person. It's far better to teach her more general tools about safety than it is to get hung up on how "real" her online "friends" are.
Fwiw, I come at this from two perspectives. My wife and I were originally online friends who met in person, so obviously online friendships are something I believe can become really meaningful. But my sister also had a LOT of phone calls and chats online in middle school with older guys who in retrospect were def grooming -- nothing bad happened to her but my mother's attempts to "crack down" on her were largely ineffective and it was really a lucky break everything worked out as it did.
💯 agree! I've also experienced both-- forming real friendships with people I met online, and coming across predators.
Re. online friends, I think it's fine. I made a bunch growing up. Some of my closest friends today are people I met online more than a decade ago through platforms like Livejournal and Deviantart. (They're local folk so we also got to meet in person.)
Re. safety, yeah. OP, the best way to protect your daughter in this regard is to teach her that her consent matters. (This includes things like, she shouldn't feel obligated to kiss/hug relatives who want to greet her this way.)
Yeah, my biggest advice would be to teach her that consent matters, and my second biggest is keeping a bond of trust open between the two of you so that she can bring things to you without fear of punishment/judgment. She's almost definitely going to be able to outsmart anything you try to put in place to keep her safe once she's older if she's sufficiently motivated -- and if you're too strict or overbearing about this sort of thing, she'll be less likely to bring something up to you if she's actually in trouble. Obviously this isn't a concern yet, but it absolutely will be, and you need to make sure you're someone she can come to when she's worried or upset about something online without getting lectured or grounded.
I mean, I have LinkedIn contacts who I have crossed paths with but they are not friends.
At that age I differentiated between best friends and friends and classmates.
It would be better if the program called these kids connections or contacts or someone you follow.
You can talk to her about how you think the program should handle it instead. Kids learn a lot when parents criticize specific choices of teachers or schools.
To start out with my own thoughts:
It does feel "bad" to me, but I have a hard time articulating why. The best way I can explain it is that it promotes an unhealthy and of engagement because the drive is to have as many friends as possible, but not to engage in any kind of meaningful relationship, or to even to see the entities behind those screen names as people at all.
I debate in trying to explain to her about ad revenue and that game makers are trying to do things to make it "feel good" so that she will spend more time there so they will make more money. I feel like it's a lot to explain to her.
This latter point is probably also how I would engage with her teacher if I were doing it right now. But I'm hoping to learn something from you all and have the interactions with my daughter and her teacher be better for it.
Yeah, don't do that...
Treating children like adults is one thing; expecting them to comprehend the nuances of capitalism and corporate incentives is another.
Generalize the lesson; that not all things that "feel good" are healthy to do. I feel good when i eat three burgers and a whole chicken, but it's not healthy.
A child can understand as well as anybody else that somebody might selfishly try to trick somebody else into doing something they really don't want to.
The more pertinent concern is that children are obstinate and oppositional and explaining things to them is not always the best way to convince them of anything (though it should still of course be done).
I think you could start explaining all of the incentives online that cause dark patterns and parasocial behavior. It just needs to be explained one piece at a time.
I drove that into my kids from a young age. They had tablets and some games thst would make them watch ads or want currency and I had regular games and would just keep hammering in the difference between how see this is the whole game you can get at once vs see this one that keeps bothering you with ads. They want you to click the ads, not have fun playing their game.
They didn't drop the tablet games right away but as they grew up they drifted to the quality games and I've heard them repeat my advertising ranting from time to time. It won't stop th but at least I know my rants are rolling around in their heads for when they form their own conclusions.
Why not just ask her? Have a conversation with her. I know she's a kid in third grade and it's not going to be a particularly riveting discussion, but why not have some dialogue to see how she thinks. You could use the Socratic method to try and address your concerns.
How do you feel when you add a new friend?
How many friends do you think you have?
Are your online friends different than your friends you see at school? What makes them different?
Who do you consider a friend?
What makes a person a good friend?
Are there people who you don't want to be your friends? (You can use this line of questioning to help make sure she can identify harmful people online.)
The "gregarious instinct" is as common among humans as the need for air, water or food. This is well explained in William McDougall's An Introduction to Social Psychology and many other readings on this topic. It's perhaps more natural for us to "want to have friends" than do anything else. It's just that social media and today's toxic way of life is actively working against that instinct and creating virtual barriers in society which I don't think is a very good thing.
Your kid is too young right now to understand even what friendship is, let alone the kinds and virtues of friendships. So asking the question at this early stage is a moot point, I wouldn't worry too much about this and let her just go with the flow (except for the very basic protective supervision that every parent does).
Absolutely not. As I said, gregariousness is as much a natural instinct as the "moral instinct" is natural in humans. If you're so worried at the prospect of your kid sending a few keystrokes to a "friend" situated remotely, just imagine how will you feel when she actually starts interacting with people and making actual friends. That's just life and that's bound to happen some day.
What harm do you or the kid's teacher foresee at all with your kid using this virtual "Enigma" machine that apparently sends some arcane signals to some mysterious folks sitting in Germany?
Maybe I'm not much familiar with your country, culture, ethos, etc. but I think these are all "tin foily" questions, the kind that network administrators wearing "tin foil hats" keep asking themselves at the NSA or CIA!
I'm gonna hard disagree on this. 4 year olds are perfectly capable of comprehending different kinds of friends, provided they have opportunity to make them. OP's kid is more like 8 or 9... I'd be more worried if they didn't have a few close and not-close friends right now.
yeah lol if anything I think kids that age have a more intricate set of "friend" categories than most adults... I remember distinguishing between friends and best friends and BFFs and several other things just for irl friends at that age.
I don't think that's a very strong point; I would guess that, now, you have a more complex and subtle understanding of the nature of your various relationships, and don't see the need to break them up into arbitrary categories (which are mostly about power and validation games anyway).
I'm not really "making a point", just observing something funny about the social dynamics when I was that age. I also wouldn't say thet were about power at all -- it was a way to socially bond with one's friends to "upgrade" them to a hugher arbitrary category lol.
I mean, think about how many times that definition changes throughout life to begin with. Lol.