A Seattle-area expert on teen sex education and counseling will be on the island tonight to give a talk titled “Digital Safety 101: Cyberbullying, Sexting and Porn, the Three Biggest Issues our Children Face With Their Screens,” as part of VARSA’s parent speaker series.
Jo Langford is a therapist, sex educator, father and author with over two decades of experience working with teens. He will talk to parents and caregivers about navigating the issues that most kids have to deal with on a daily basis.
“As technology has evolved, issues surrounding sexuality have developed,” he said. “So about six years ago I started going out into communities to talk specifically about these digital concerns.”
Langford, a graduate of New Mexico State and Bastyr universities with a bachelor’s degree in clinical psychology and a master’s in systems counseling, moved to Seattle in 1993, and has been working with teens — mostly boys — since training as a peer counselor in high school. His book, “Spare Me The Talk! A Guy’s Guide to Sex, Relationships and Growing Up,” was published last summer, and he says that community-based, sexual education is a passion of his because by its nature, it is integral in creating healthy lives for teens.
In his Vashon talk, he will cover the most popular social networking applications (used by 12 to 24-year-olds) and explain how each works, their primary purpose and the good, the bad and the ugly as far as how they stack up on the “Big Bad Three”: Sexting, cyberbullying and pornography.
“These issues are a feature of adolescence right now,” Langford said. “Kids need to know that it’s happening and how to deal with it.”
Langford explains that while any social media service or application can be used in bad ways, the ones he puts into the “good” category for kids are the ones where users are generally well-behaved, such as Instagram. His definition of a “bad” application is one that puts kids at risk for bullying and/or humiliation, such as Snapchat, and the “ugly” include any, such as Kik, that encourage users to mask their identities and behavior, be mean to others or actively pursue illegal activity and put them at risk of being located by predators.
“When bad behavior stands out, it’s probably a good app,” he said. “If it seems normal across the platform, then it’s not.”
A big believer in family contracts, specifically around behavior and safety, Langford will also cover the main points that should be included when designing family guidelines or house rules around technology.
On his website, beheroes.net, Langford offers free, downloadable PDF guides and templates for family contracts covering topics such as online responsibility, smart phone use, social networking, online gaming and more. Anyone planning to attend the talk is encouraged to print out and bring any they are specifically interested in going over.
Langford will speak at 7 p.m. tonight, March 23, at Vashon High School.
