‘Digital babysitters’ could dangerous for your child.

My name is Cynthia Lopez, I am a Miami Dade Certified Math Teacher. Today I would like to talk to parents about the dangers that children can be exposed to when using different applications on the Internet.

As a parent, you always do the best for your children. However, it is important to be aware of the world around them. This is a complex world where evil is so well hidden that we do not see it, we do not smell it, we ignore its presence, we assume that it does not exist, or we simply do not recognize it and allow it to enter our home, which could affect it tremendously, exposing our children to situations, to languages, to ideas that we would never have wanted to expose them to. We must be alert, very alert. 

I tell you all this because every day I hear more and more stories of parents who discover that among the virtual friends of their children there are adults who pose as children who propose actions that have nothing to do with previously established games. These adults falsify their identity using photos they get on the internet to pretend to be children and make our children believe that it is okay to include them in their virtual friend circles.

A few days ago a father came to me concerned about an experience he had with his 9-year-old daughter, whom he gave permission to play on TicToc with her classmates from school using an application that allows these types of meetings. What danger could there be? , he knew them and had seen them play before and knew what the game was about. In this application, all communication is done through written text. After a while, he heard her daughter make a comment about an instruction given to her by one of the participants, and he heard her use a vocabulary that was not her own, and he questioned her daughter about what was happening. She explained that suddenly a girl they did not know had entered the game, they allowed her to enter since she described herself as a girl just like them. The father decided to observe what was happening and reviewed the conversation and the vocabulary that the alleged girl used and realized that the said girl was an adult, her conversation was not that of a 9-year-old girl, it had a sexual connotation and she asked to do things that had nothing to do with the activity that was carried out.

As I said earlier, evil exists, people whose goal is to give themselves pleasure at the expense of children who are always the most vulnerable. Thanks to the fact that the father was attentive, things did not get worse. He did precisely what He had to do.

The computer / Internet are not babysitters. This is handled for good and for evil. That is why we have to be very aware of the games, the pages, the networkings where their children enter. Sometimes your son or daughter has a virtual friend who is an adult and he or she believes that it is a young person like them, who surrounds them in a way that makes them do everything from experimenting with drugs to leaving home or committing suicide.

‘Digital babysitters’ place children at risk.