In a lot of ways I am really glad that my children have grown and left home. When they were growing up all we as parents had to worry about was sex, drugs and rock n‘ roll. Now parents have to worry about sex, drugs and the Internet – or at least the bad and evil Internet as propagated by the mainstream media.

The evils of IRC (Internet relay chat for you young ‘uns out there) and ICQ are now replaced by MySpace stalking, Bebo suicides, and Second Life drugs and porn. Next, it will be the dangers of Twitter and the hidden terrors of Facebook. It is all about using scare tactics to drive up ratings, but in the end parents are left scared and not knowing what to do.

The fact is that with our constant push forward with social media and the increasing move to live our lives openly on the Web, the truths behind some of these big media scare tactics will happen more and more. Michael Masnick points to a recent study bemoaning the fact that the parents aren’t living up to their responsibilities by monitoring their kids.

As Michael says though:

Of course, the simple fact is that parents are never going to be able to fully monitor what their kids do online (at least without seriously pissing off their kids). If kids want to chat online, they're going to find a way to be able to do so. Perhaps rather than focusing so much on spying on everything that kids do, the focus should be more on educating them to the dangers that are out there, the laws that they should be aware of and the risks of not obeying them.

As easy and intellectual as that might be to say it is an entirely different matter if you are a single mother raising your children who are constantly texting who knows who or chatting online with people who the mother has no idea of who they are. Half the time the kids themselves may not even really know who it is on the other end of that high speed connection.

It does no good though to scare the parents or to blame them for the conditions under which their children are growing up because they have no control of their own in many cases. Parents in fear will react in so many different ways and not all of them good or even beneficial for helping their children learn the right and wrong way to deal with an online life. Parents need to understand as hard as it maybe that just as there were bad things when they were growing up, their children are facing the same things.

Just as our parents were terrified by the changes — they thought rock ‘n roll and long hair were evil and would be the death of us — we feel the same way about the technology that our children deal with everyday.

There are no hard and fast rules here for parents and don’t let anyone kid you otherwise. Like our parents we’ll be struggling through on a wing and a prayer trying on one hand to make sense of this technology ourselves; and the other hand teaching our children how to use it responsibly. The only thing one can really do is try your best to learn along with your kids but gently add your life experience to those lessons. Learn to trust your kids because spying on them won’t do any family any good in the long run.

Most of all though, don’t succumb to the fear that people who profit from making you afraid will be trying to shove down your throats. And remember, like Allen Stern said in his post about the Second Life scare story by NBC:

Again, while I don't use Second Life, my guess is that you can find these things anywhere online even outside this "dark side" virtual world.

That, my friends, is a given. Just as you can find them on any street in any city in any country on this planet.