Zwinky

Zwinky is a chat site that uses stupid ass looking cartoon characters to interact with other kids / adults from around the world / country. Ember uses Zwinky as her primary chat source and cyber “hookup” site. Because she is only 10, her “hookups” only consist of being someone’s cyber bf or gf. And that personal typically changes on a daily or weekly basis – last week it was some guy with the screen name of Kraven (who she actually took a step further with and got his email address and was MSN Messenger chatting as well – more on that in a bit), this week its someone with the name hilc3. Keeping up with her cyber bfs is sometimes a challenge.

Back to the Kraven character. As soon as she added his email address to her messenger list I went and checked up on him online – MySpace, Facebook and all the rest – in addition to a detailed Google search. As it turns out he is 18, lives in Puerto Rico and really is no threat to come looking for my daughter. Their conversations were completely platonic. But, I’m always leery of anyone who talks to my daughters.

This new guy is a little different. He’s still playing the bf/gf game but he’s a lot more possessive of my daughters character than the other guy. She hasn’t given him her email address, so that’s good. He’s also more physical with his chats – more kisses, hugs, etc. I don’t like it and so I’ve created my own Zwinky character to monitor what shes up to in real-time. I am, however, very proud of my daughter’s reaction to Hilcs advances – she pushes him away and says she’s 10 and doesn’t do adult things. She knows the limits we’ve set and sticks to them even when she thinks no one is watching. That is conforting. Of course, if she didn’t I’d block her MAC address until I had time to “retrain” her.

Zwinky is not as kid friendly as VMK (Disneys Kid Chat area), and allows more of the “bad” words – in fact VMK doesn’t even let you say “hot” – so the kids have worked around it and now they ask each other if they are “hat.” Since when do 10 and 11 year old kids care if they are “hot” or not?

Zwinky still doesn’t allow outright profane language – it automatically “(bleeps)” obviously bad words. But if they put a space somewhere in the word, it allows it. The funny thing I’ve done with Zwinky and my daughter is to tell Ember that Zwinky emails me when she does something that is not right. It works great because it gives me an outlet to let her think that someone is watching what is going on and if things get out of hand, we WILL know about it.

It gives her freedom with a safety net.