Online Communication for teens.

Teens are communicating more and more through online means as opposed in person or over the phone.

USA Today published an article on teens involvement with blogs and online journals. It details the concerns parents have for the kind of personal information the teens are putting on the web. The main argument the article poses is how parents should deal with the information teens are posting. It seems that a lot of parents believe that they would be over stepping boundaries by reading their teens blogs. They equate it to reading a paper diary their teens might keep, something they wouldn't do.

The New York Times also published a similar article. However, the two articles have different views on how parents should deal with the information teens are putting on the web. This article seems to focus on telling the parents how to find out what teens are posting. The parents seem to feel like they have to monitor what teens are putting online in order to help keep them safe.

I started my online journal at LiveJournal as a young teen and I know I would have felt like my privacy was being taken away if my parents had read it. But knowing now what I do about online predators, and how some teens make it easy for people to find them, has me torn as to which article I agree the most with. On one hand, I feel like parents should respect their teens privacy and trust that they've taught them enough to know what kind of information is safe for the web. On the other, parents can never really know if their teens are following their rules if they don't check up on them.

Both articles, however, share the same concerns for safety. I feel like it is a very fine line between infringing on the privacy of teens and keeping them safe when it comes to monitoring their online involvement.