West Michigan's Morning News
"Sadfishing" - A New Trend with Teens
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Social media means a lot, especially to teens. What is sad fishing? What do we need to know? So sad fishing is a common reaction for someone who's going through a hard time, or really pretending to be going through a hard time. It's a play on the term "pat fishing." And it's an emotional state where children are trying to, children and teens are trying to make exaggerated claims about their emotional problems or trying to generate sympathy. It's really a cry for help or a cry for attention. Not unlike those adults that post things like just not feeling it today or I wish this month was over already or stuff like that. It's very much similar because the difference is that children don't have the wisdom of how to really filter out who is worthy of these conversations. So they make themselves vulnerable, hoping to get this attention. And then they invite in these predators who are looking for that specific vulnerability. How dangerous is this too, where it's a little boy-cried wolf situation, where if they're inundated with so many of these kinds of posts, when they see even maybe a friend putting out those red flags, yet they don't tell anyone about it. A parent or a teacher or someone who can intervene before maybe something really bad does happen. Yeah, this is really a cry. It's a mental health situation. It's a cry for help. And children and teenagers are going through hormonal changes. They're going through all kinds of different things. To where now they want this attention. They're looking for somebody to accept them, to give them attention. And it becomes a kind of a thing where unless you know as a parent, what's going on with your child or as a community of friends, what's going on with your friends, you really are exposing yourself and making yourself vulnerable, your child is to be dangerous. And David, as parents, we need to be more aware of this right now, because it's summer time. That means more time, most likely on your phones, because they're bored or looking for something to do. You don't have school hours or regular things that are related with school going on right now, right? Exactly. There's a lot of social structure that's done on social media, especially for teenagers. And so they're spending all of their time posting, looking for likes and looking for ways to connect with a greater audience. And that's one of the dangers of social media is that now you have this vast audience that just feeds this emotional state of your child. There are conflicting schools of thought, and I'd like to hear your opinion, maybe on either one or you can weigh in if you want. If you're going to provide a phone for your children that has access to this stuff, do you have, as a parent, the right to demand that you get all of their social media handles passwords and all that good stuff? Or are you supposed to, as a parent, supposed to start with trust and assume that they're doing it right to begin with? That's a very interesting question in a Pandora's box, if you will. So parents, it's an uphill battle at this point, because social media and devices and everything are the way that we communicate, are the way our children communicate. So to your question, you have to have some kind of oversight, especially as a child is young and then getting introduced to social media. I believe that there's an age where you can demand certain things as part of a phone contract, basically. Sure, we're going to give you a phone, but these are the guidelines that we're going to make sure that you follow. This way, you at least set the expectation, right? And if your child already has that device and you're already freaked out about what they may be exposed to, then you've got to figure out how to dial that back a bit, how to open that conversation to where now they've already got this freedom, and now you want to be a part of that freedom, right? Great stuff is always online safety expert, CEO of GameSafe. One word, David Ebert, thank you for your time today. Great talking to you all.