Naughty

Apparently all my kids are naughty! In the online world, dealing with bullies and hate speech is constantly a topic. It’s very easy in an anonymized world to pop off to people in ways that you might not if you were in the same room. Quinton has shown us that for years, though he was pretty inventive about it. At one point, I think he had 5 or 6 different free email addresses that he would use to sign back up for services that he got banned from because he was bullying or harassing people. I never in my life thought that my demure, perfect little daughter would be up to the same shenanigans…

About a week ago, Mireille asked me if I could help her sign up for a new account in Roblox, a popular online game that she plays. I went quickly into troubleshooting mode and asked her why she couldn’t just use her account that we had setup and put money into. She replied that she, “just got logged out, I’m not sure why.” I seriously have put lots of money into that Roblox account so she could acquire digital assets and play different games, so I didn’t want to see my investment go to waste, so I prodded a little more, still none the wiser.

I remembered that there is a way to login to Roblox from another device. I’ve done this several times to put more “Robux” into her account. So I went to my computer where I knew we were logged in so that we could use that to log her into her device. That’s when I was met with this message.

Armed with new knowledge, I changed my line of questioning somewhat. I wanted to find out who she said this to and why. At first she told me that she didn’t say it - it just came up on her screen and then she got logged out! After a bit of torture, er, continued questioning, the tears came out and she exlaimed that she was going to “tell me the truth.” Of course it was quite the sob story involving her as the hero coming to the aid of somebody that was being bullied - I have no reason not to believe it, but it still makes me roll my eyes.

At the end of the day, it made for a good opportunity to have another conversation about online safety and the proper ways to interact with people that you don’t know, which I wish meant that she didn’t interact with them at all, but as my other children have shown me, there’s little chance in putting that genie back in its bottle, so the best I can hope for is that they know how to do so in a safe fashion, and how to accept the consequences of their interactions, which in this case was a 1 day ban…