The dangers of this new generation has been increasingly alarming. Your children are more susceptible to dangers that aren’t visible to the public eye. If you aren’t careful enough, your children could be potential victims.
This generation has been prone to abuses unlike the previous generations. Physical attacks from bullies, social pressures from peers. Abusive words from online friends, unfiltered contents that exposes your children to pornography. Animated contents that imparts same sexual orientations that causes confusion for a boy or a girl. Online games that ruins your children’s academic performance, and even the use of gadgets at a young age tend to have a strong emotional, psychological and social impact that greatly affects their cognitive and social behavior both as a student and as an individual.
Gone are the days where a stranger will give candies to your children and abduct him/her. Although social experiments are continuously promoting awareness of this issue. Gone are the days where your child will fight head to head with his bully but instead, silently suffers and later on commit a suicide because depression took its toll in his fragility. Gone are the days where your children will attend pajama parties or group studies, instead, pre-occupied with drinking sessions and online gaming activities. Just as how fast the technology is changing, your children are facing extreme dangers in reality, virtual realm, social media and even emotional attacks.
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Children nowadays are actively participating in trending topics, hashtag parties, and challenges that are extreme to deadly. Simple challenges like make-up transformation challenge and ice-bucket challenge. Extreme challenges like kiki challenge and selfie challenge while driving, to name a few. But these are just a few of the disturbing trends that Generation Z, or the Gen Z are partaking.
Child trafficking has been rampant over the years. It has been the topic in the global news over the issues of missing children and abducted children. Lately, abducted children has been circulating both online and traditional media worldwide as some sources claims that they are abducting children and their organs are being sold in the black market. Other incidents surfaces such they are being sold to pedophiles and lolicons in the internet.
BLUE WHALE GAME CHALLENGE
Rumors surfaced about a deadly suicide game circulating online. The Blue Whale Suicide Game, is believed to be a social media group where the group administrator assigns daily tasks to members which will be completed when you finished the 50th task, where it was reported that they will instruct the young gamer to commit suicide.
MINECRAFT SEXUAL GROOMING
Among all the famous online games for children, Minecraft is not just about virtual building blocks and creating your own world. There are incidents of molesters called groomers who operates in this game. Sexually explicit languages are indicators that you are playing with a groomer. This culprit asks personal information of the young victim, the victim’s location, where the child’s parents’ work and how long are they playing the game. It was supposedly a friendship, and trust development within the game but sexual predators are using it as bait to their victims.
ROBLOX GANG-RAPED AVATAR
Dubbed as the number one gaming site for children, recommended for ages 7 and up, and roughly has 64 million users, who would have thought that the game you thought was for children will have explicit contents contrary to the youngster’s age. This game is similar to Minecraft where it contains a multiplayer gaming online platform that allows the user to create their own personal avatar and own adventures.
FORTNITE AND MASS SHOOTING
A Hunger Games-like multiplayer shooting game played by 40 million users worldwide where they hunt for weaponry and hunt your enemies. (If you are familiar with games such as PUBG and the vintage game CounterStrike, you will have an idea of this game.) The issue is not just about enjoying the game but rather the familiarity of the weapons and the confidence of having a gun. The US has been lately scrutinize in its gun ban as mass shooting has been prevalent in schools recently.
MOMO CHALLENGE HOAX
Among all the famous games in this list, Momo Challenge is by far a game that started from conspiracy theorist. Claiming it now as a hoax, it was an actual sculpture of a mother bird by a Japanese sculpture. Later this Momo(the famous icon) bird image was used in the deep web and surfaced in a form of Momo Challenge.
SEXUAL CHAT AND VIDEO CALLING
Just like child trafficking, this has been in the internet since time immemorial. mIRC, Yahoo Chatrooms, Camfrog, and now Tinder, Grindr, Messenger are some of the famous chat and video calling applications that are used by sexual offenders, maniacs, pedophiles, hookers, exes, womanizers, hackers and revenge seekers to access photos and videos. It is even used as a tool on sharing video scandals and leak unwarranted files of a victim.
There is no safe place for your children. Even the virtual world has been flooded with disturbing and dangerous things and trends. How then can we protect our children?
- Know what they are up to
- Check their accounts once in a while
- Try to meet their friends both in real and online
- Get their trust so they will open up
- Listen to every detail of their stories
- Avoid prolong social engagements with strangers
- Set a time for the usage of their gadget
The greatest thing you could do as a parent is to make a time with your children.
If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them and half as much money.
-Abigail Van Buren