BOOST Collaborative

Many articles being written lately are suggesting that parents are the missing piece in solving the cyberbullying puzzle. What they are suggesting is that communication between parents and their children is often too many times missing. Parents need to truly get involved in “cyber” discussions with their children. We need to take the initiative to dialogue on “cyber” issues that our children are engaging in. The following questions and strategies will help parents initiate and sustain conversations with their children.

Initiating Conversation Questions:

In developing school based approaches to create safe schools and positive school climates the single most important factor that youth leadership programs neglect to focus in on is the importance of developing a sense of belonging to a group identity for young people.  We know that  “After transition to middle school, peers become primary sources of support and motivation to achieve while the quality of teacher-student relationships tends to decline with time” (Wentzel, 1996).  As we set a calendar each year to tackle the critical issues in youth development with great activities, assemblies, and orientations, we must first address the importance of a student body feeling included or connected to the youth leaders facilitating the activities. A major finding of 90,000 students grade 7-11 is that when students feel connected (i.e., feel close to people at school, happy to be at school, part of the school, treated fairly, feel safe) to their school that this “connectedness” is protective against every health risk behavior—alcohol use, suicidal attempts, teen pregnancy, and acts of violence towards others.  It is this “connectedness” that we must establish as a foundation of our youth leadership program.

A youth leadership model that takes on this approach is the PLUS Program (Peer Leaders Uniting Students) model. PLUS was founded out of this necessary fundamental need to feel a sense of belonging to a group identity.  This need for a sense of belonging to a group, becomes the catalyst to engage youth in meaningful participation facilitated by the group in which they feel this sense of belonging to. The PLUS model seeks to protect, connect and educate kids in an effort to create a culture on campuses and in communities where inclusion is a reality for young people.  Steps to implementation include.

If we want to know what is going on in the cyberworld with our kids, we need to get into the cyberworld.

A new frontier has quickly developed and for many adults it is a frontier that is very foreign to us.  This new frontier is the Cyberworld.  This world offers our kids some pretty amazing things that can help foster their growth as an individual and provide information that accelerates their educational learning opportunities.  Developed as an educator’s tool for sharing, the internet and cyberworld has quickly taken on a dark side.  To understand the risk factors associated with this dark side, parents must get into the cyberworld immediately.