Teens: It's a diary. Adults: It's unsafe.

Aftab of WiredSafety.org supports adolescent privacy with pen-and-paper diaries, for instance, because the content there is "between [the child] and the page," whereas website content is "for the whole world to see." Posting private Web content before age 16 only invites trouble, she says, yet many teens do it in a highly public bid for "attention, recognition, and affection."

Lisa O'Beirne, another Assumption School mother of a 13-year-old, tries to put safety first. For example, she got her daughter a cellular phone, she says, "so I always know where she is." She calls her daughter at least once every 30 minutes whenever she's not in school. She says her daughter, Ashley, at first protested, saying, "Why are you always calling me? You're embarrassing me." But in this, as in her rule forbidding Web postings by her daughter, the rationale is that the end justifies the means.

"My daughter has said, 'You're making me feel like an outcast' " because her friends participate in "social networking websites" such as myspace.com, Ms. O'Beirne says.

"But I'm going to do everything I can to protect my child," she adds. "Whether she believes it's because we love her ... or we're trying to make her an outcast, when she's grown up she'll realize why we do what we do."

Finding the right balance between security and freedom, however, can be a challenge, many find.

Parents are right to "exercise an unusual amount of caution in this area because the damage can be so great," says the Rev. John Conley, a Fordham University professor of philosophy and frequent writer on the subject of rights and relationships within families.

Where cautious parents sometimes err, he says, is in adopting rigid computer usage rules that don't evolve as a child demonstrates responsibility and discretion.

"What can be damaging to the child is if, like, at the age of 18, the child is being bound by the same rules as in early adolescence," Fr. Conley says. "Children at some point ... are going to have to exercise their own judgment and their own freedom. [That won't occur] unless the parents are willing to relax the rules" at some point between ages 12 and 18.

One area youths can run into trouble with their own Web postings, according to Wiredsafety.org, is by menacing their peers.

Aftab gives a hypothetical example of bullying in a teenager who pretends to be another student by putting up a website, identifying the student as gay, and declaring a sexual preference for football players.

More common is lying to get access. Myspace.com, for instance, requires that participants be 16 or older; hence the scores of underage teens who use it have simply lied about their age to establish a site there.

Shannon Sullivan, for instance, says she did just that. Still, she didn't see the enterprise as dangerous until adults told stories about the potential horrors.

"I don't go in chat rooms," Shannon says. "I'm against talking to people I don't know [on the Internet]. But I just hadn't thought about what could happen at the myspace [blog]."

Lying about age should concern parents, Steinberg says, because it violates a trust code.

He also encourages families to "have a talk about Internet safety," and to put computers in public spaces in the home, where troublesome activity is less likely to occur.

Still, Steinberg says, while parents need to monitor Web usage by teens ("Is my child involved in something unlawful or dangerous?"), they also should accept that they won't always know everything about a child's life, especially as children become older teens.

"There are going to be lots of things that I don't know about [in my child's life], and that's OK," Steinberg says. "It's part of the development process."

Page: 1 | 2