Ireland's social-Web guide for parents

Ireland's Ministry of Justice, Equality and Law Reform has just published a parents' guide to social networking, technology news site ENN reports. "The guide explains what social networking Web sites are and how they operate, all in a user-friendly format." The beauty of this is how available the booklet will be and that it's free. The government will distribute it through libraries, community information centres, credit unions, and Web sites, and mobile-phone companies will do so through their retail outlets. Please see the article for links. And - forgive the shameless self-promotion - my co-author and I published such a Parent's Guide to Teen Social Networking in the US and UK a couple of years ago (see MySpaceUnraveled.com) with Peachpit Press and Pearson Education.

Parents liking social networking too

Some parents are setting up accounts at sites like MySpace and Facebook to keep an eye on their teens, then finding themselves becoming avid social networkers too, KABC in Los Angeles reports. One mom told ABC she found MySpace a great way to find people she went to high school with, another said she was now "hooked" on social networking herself. "A recent survey shows 40% of MySpace users are now between the ages of 35 and 54. And Facebook reports its fastest growing age group is 25 and older," according to KABC.

US parents on kids' media: Study

Two-thirds of parents are very concerned about the amount of inappropriate content US children are exposed to, but they’re mostly talking about other people’s children, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s just-released study, “Parents, Children & Media." Only 20% of parents say their own children are seeing a lot of inappropriate content. The study included a national survey of more than 1,000 parents of kids 2-17 and six focus groups with parents held around the US. In other findings, 65% of parents say they closely monitor their kids’ media use and only 18% say they should be monitoring more (16% say it’s not necessary to monitor their kids’ media use). Where the Internet’s concerned, about 75% of parents “check what Web sites their children have visited, and even more look at how kids are profiled on MySpace and who's on their Instant Message ‘buddy lists’,” USATODAY reports in its coverage of the study, which quotes lead Kaiser researcher Victoria Rideout as saying parents feel they’re getting on top of their kids’ Internet use (yet KNX Radio’s headlines was “Study Shows Many Parents are Clueless when it Comes to their Kids and the Internet”). Kaiser also found that 59% of parents say the Internet is “mainly a positive force in their children’s lives”; only 7% say it’s “mainly negative.” And 73% of parents say they “know a lot about what their kids are doing online,” Kaiser found.