Today's Children Are 'Growing Up Online'

I tuned into the PBS documentary "Growing Up Online" Tuesday night on Frontline for two reasons. As a member of Generation X, I'm just on the outskirts of this technologically suave generation and am striving to keep up with them. And as a mother of toddlers, I will be faced with raising children smack in the middle of this generation.

When the Internet came out and everyone wanted to regulate it, I remember thinking why? It's a form a free speech. Let people say what they want and if I don't want to hear it, I won't visit their site.

But now the thought of my twins venturing online when they has me freaking out. How can I ensure their safety? How can I control/monitor what they see and do? How can I prevent them from making stupid mistakes that become a permanent part of the World Wide Web for all to see and mock?

But I think the show described it best when it talked about the Internet as a social network for kids. When I was a kid, we hung out at the mall or the rec center. My parents hung out at the malt shop (I'm guessing). For this generation, the hang out is electronic.

According to the documentary, kids go online to express them, to complain about parents and to communicate with each other. All the things I did at my favorite hang out.

And just like my parents had concerned about me at the mall, I'll have concerns about my children on the Internet. But instead of blowing these fears out of proportion, parents need to adjust with the times to appropriately address the issues.

And to do so, parents need to understand the terminology and the reason for their child's interest in the Internet.

The documentary showed some teenage girls defining "friends." They would have contests to see who had the most friends, numbering in the thousands, on MySpace. But according to these girls, they understood that they only "really knew" about 200 of these so-called friends and only about 50 of them were "best friends."

I don't know about you, but growing up I had one, maybe two, best friends. And I'm not sure that I've ever really known 200 people.