Totally Wired

Does your teen spend hours online and you have only a vague idea of what he may be doing or who he is conversing with? Perhaps you’re the parent of a tween and fear the day when she will be uploading her profile pictures or writing a blog on one of the popular social-networking sites like Myspace or Facebook? You are certainly not alone in your fears; research shows that the numbers of children online are skyrocketing. According to last year’s Jupiter Research Online Behavior and Demographics report, the online teen population regularly accessing the Internet will peak in 2008 at 20.9 million.

A 2007 report released by Comscore Data found that 70 percent of today’s fifteen to thirty-four year-olds “utilize social-networking sites at all hours of the day and night to fulfill diverse reasons.”

These statistics alone don’t tell the whole picture, clearly, and that is what inspired Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens are Really Doing Online, published in early 2007 by St. Martin’s Press. Goodstein says that media coverage has hyped the dangers of the online world to the extent that parents are overly afraid.

“I think that because the coverage of online predators has been so sensationalized in the media, especially with programs like Dateline’s ‘To Catch a Predator,’ online predators are many parents’ number one concern. The reality is that more children and teens are abducted or assaulted by someone they know than a stranger they meet online,” she explains.

Goodstein interviewed many parents of teens when conducting research for her book and is currently on a book tour across America where she answers questions in a Town Hall format at various high school PTAs.  (For a complete listing of her tour dates, visit her Web site.)

The blogger and former journalist says that she likes to educate parents to better help them understand who is on social-networking sites in order to ease their fears.                                                                                                                                                             “Law enforcement has begun to release information about which teens are engaging with online predators, and it’s not the children or teens who naïvely post photos of themselves wearing T-shirts with their school name on it. More often than not, it’s children or teens who are already at risk, meaning they have either been victimized in the past, or are having problems at home. These are the teens more vulnerable to adults who want to prey on them,” she says.