Should Your Child Have a Blog? Part 2

Last week, I posted part one of Should Your Child Have a Blog? where I shared the positive aspects.  This week, I'd like to share the negative aspects of your child having a blog. Too much inward time to retreat into shyness One of the drawbacks of spending time by himself is that your child may withdraw further into his shell and retreat back into his shyness.  While communicating online can be a good way to slowly immersing himself in communication with others, a blog is more solitary than is social networking. Rude Spam Comments Be careful of the dreaded rude spam comments he will need to filter through.  Some are simply nonsense, but some are inappropriate or even worse.  One way to help with spam is to install Akismet which will put all comments not already approved into a folder on your blog that you can either delete or approve as you like. The problem with this is that if you let your child filter them, he will need to read them through in order to do so. Too much access /too public Though the search engines generally don't bring many visitors to a blog or site unless it's optimized or heavily marketed, a WordPress blog may already be optimized for search engine optimization.  If you decide to allow your child to use Homeschool Blogger, there is a built in community of bloggers.  You may not want your child to be that accessible to the public. False sense of security Just because there are no comments on a blog doesn't mean nobody is reading it.  There is sometimes a false sense of security in a blog that has no comments which can lead to the divulging too much personal information. Too open/free with info If your child falls into the above category, he may be too open and free with personal information which can lead to various online problems including damaged friendships as information gets back to offline friends from those who are reading and even stalking situations. Comment Envy Lastly, I'd like to mention what I call Comment Envy.  This is the term I coined for what you feel when you write a fabulous blog post that will solve world hunger or create world peace and you only get three comments (and one of them is a man who found you on Google and wants to know how you found your template.)  Now the focus is on the fame and not on the content or the great benefits you originally talked about when agreeing to let him have a blog. Blogging can be a wonderful experience for a child, but a parent needs to take into account many negative and positives about blogging as well as their own child's age and personality before coming to a decision.  Even after that decision has been carefully weighed, periodic monitoring is always a good idea to ensure that blogging is still a good idea for your child. What are your thoughts?  Does your child have a blog?  Share your story.