Teens and Social Networking

Being a part of a social networking site (yes, this one!) has really opened my eyes to how huge this phenomenon has become. As a parent, it kinda scares me that more people - especially kids - are meeting "virtually" every day. Will we some day become a society of hermits, just communicating through these boxes on our desks? I sure hope not, and that is the goal of MothersClick: giving us the tools to connect online to actively promote real-life networks between moms offline. As most moms know, there's so much more value that can come from in-person relationships.

More importantly, you have absolutely no idea who you're really talking to in cyberspace! This issue is front and center when it comes to young people using the internet to make new friends. A new study reports that 70% of teen girls have a profile on some sort of social networking site - most of these are on myspace. That's pretty much all teenage girls with a computer!

This fact is something that parents really need to be aware of. While the article states that most of these new "friends" are friends of other friends (not necessarily strangers), you still never know who's attached to the other keypad. Monitoring of your kids' online time is something each parent is going to have to figure out for themselves, but at least we should all know how widespread and prevalent this usage is.

It's easy to see how teenage girls could fall into the trap of wanting to be popular by seeing how many "friends" they can find. And it's up to us, as parents, to make sure they know how special they are, whether they have 10 or 10,000 friends. Not an easy task, as I'm sure I will begin to realize in about 10 years.