"Frontier: Growing up online"

The 21 century is full of technology, sometimes it helps sometimes it leads to tragedies. With time passing by internet became a way of living for children and teenagers. www.PBS.org is a great web site that's dedicated mainly to children growing up in their cyber worlds and their parents that don't even know what're doing. It tries to open parents eyes to this new problem, of teenagers spending their life in front of the computer. Some parents don't even know what is going on online and how that could effect teenagers life. Internet is not only used for school related work or silly games anymore, now teenagers can have their cyber friends, with whom they share their secreats, exchange ideas and support themselves. I read this interview on "Frontier: growing up online" with John Halligan a father of a 13-years old boy that committed a suicide in which internet helped him. Some parents are more affraied of smaller issues like meeting up with some predators where in reality the picture is much bigger. Sometimes internet itself can do more harm to a teenager or a child than another human, exchanging suicide tips, supporting each other in eating disorder, this are much bigger issues that we should carefully watch for. Candace Kelsey wrote "Generation Myspace" in which she adresses the issue of using website like this and the time spend on them. "Many of my students are not just on MySpace at 8:00 at night. For many of them it's 4:00 in the morning, 3:00 in the morning, for hours on end."Parents shouldn't be affraid of their children they should help them anyway they can by learning about internet and its usage. They should also have some control of how much their are using it and at what time.