I HIGHLY recommend that you purchase the amazing downloadable book: The Dirt E-Secrets of an Internet Kid by teen mentor/family trainer/parenting blogger extraordinaire, Vanessa Van Petten (www.onteenstoday.com)

This book is chockful of important information for parents from someone “in the know.” Vanessa is a young adult who is totally hooked into technology (as are virtually all kids in her generation). She covers the 3 “pillars” of technology - IMing, cell phones, and social networking - and she betrays her peers and mentees (!!) by spilling every secret that parents need to know.

Just to give you a taste, here are the TOP THREE EXAMPLES OF INADEQUATE ADVICE that parents get that don’t solve any problems whatsoever, and just serve to lull parents into a FALSE sense of security:

• FALSE: Keep the computer in a public room
• FALSE: Know all of your kids’ passwords
• FALSE: Ask your kids to see their profile and then look at it with them

I know I’m using a lot of capital letters - this is how important I think this book is and how much I support Vanessa.

Really - buy this book!

Hey there!  Margit Crane back again!

One of my friends discovered that her son had an illegal MySpace page.  (Illegal because he’s underaged).  I asked her how she discovered it and here’s her advice:

Hi Margit,

Pretty easy - he had left his computer on and there were desktop links to his page! I didn’t even have to log in - he was still logged in. I guess it was meant to be….

Check Favorite Places on their computers, History of websites visited, etc. [He's] a great kid and he wasn’t trying to hide it - I think he was just doing it for fun and in innocence….He lost computer privileges for one month.
 

Good mom!  She gave him a consequence too!