EduHookups.com is currently only available to college students, but watch out parents. That's how Facebook started.

The site's “about” page says that eduHookups is for “students that believe working hard and having fun are not mutually exclusive” and encourages visitors to “register and put themselves out there.” Indeed. In a nutshell, eduHookups is basically a site for arranging casual, no-strings-attached sex with strangers for students at a select number of colleges and universities across the U.S. (right now, 25 and counting.) The site assures that it's “safer than using Craigslist” because it requires a .edu email address to register and hang out in the site's chatroom or respond privately to the public “listings” of students.

Like most families today, our family sees the Internet is an indispensable part of life as we know it. Letters written laboriously with a pen or pencil? Looking up phone numbers in a 3-inch thick Yellow Pages? Opening up a bound encyclopedia for information? Honestly, I couldn’t imagine going a day without the Internet.

Even with all its charm and convenience, I have to say that seeing my oldest child reach the age where she’s starting to get online makes me more than a little apprehensive.

As a parent, I try to shield her from things that could be dangerous for her, and right now I have complete control over what comes into my home. But when she starts using the Internet, I know that there are lots of sexually explicit or violent images that she could potentially be exposed to.

The boundary between kids and online pornography is dangerously transparent. And it doesn’t just affect kids who are actively seeking out graphic material online. According to the Crimes Against Children Research Center, 25% of children have had unwanted exposure to sexual pictures in the last year.

Kids with their own email accounts, particularly free ones like Hotmail and Yahoo, inevitably get lots of spam ads for penis enlargement and “lonely girls who want to chat with you” delivered right to their inboxes.

Or they could be doing their homework and be exposed to graphic images online by accident. Try it yourself – type a female celebrity’s name into Google and click the “images” link on the upper righthand corner. The odds are pretty good that at least one suggestive or inappropriate image will come up – or more, depending on the celebrity. And Google images does not censor its pictures. Full-frontal nudity and graphic acts show up in image searches, regardless of the age of the child at the computer screen.

To compound the problem, Internet pornography is often much worse than the magazines kids a few decades ago might have passed around at school. Ernie Allen, CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, explains that online porn “is not your father’s pornography. It is graphic, it is explicit, it is deviant. It is aberrant. Kids are seeing content that no 12 or 13 year old is mentally, psychologically, or emotionally prepared to deal with.”

If you’re like me, at this point you’re wondering if just shutting off the Internet altogether isn’t such a crazy idea, after all. But it’s not feasible in the long run, and it’s failing to address the real problem. Even if kids aren’t exposed to online pornography in your own home, they could accidentally see it in a friend’s house or even at the computers in the school library. Teach them how to react when it happens: close the browser window and tell you that they’ve seen an explicit image online.

Chances are that sometime in the last 24 hours you have watched your teen stop whatever they’re doing, whip out their phone to read and fire back a fast and furious text message, then snap the phone shut and get back to work. But how well can they really work on a task when they’re constantly stopping to send and receive texts?

It’s no surprise that for teens, texting is the most popular way to use cell phones. June data from the Pew Internet Research Forum reports that 88% of teens use their phones for texting, and that the typical teen sends 50 texts per day. What about the really prolific texters? 31% report sending over 100 per day, and 14% say they send over 200 per day – that’s more than 6,000 texts a month!

Does your teen have to check her phone the second a text comes in, no matter what she’s doing? Does texting regularly interrupt mealtime and homework time? Does it seem like your teen is constantly “on call”? If so, have you considered the impact texting may be having on her sleep?

Night Texting and Sleep Requirements

Healthy teenagers actually need more sleep than elementary school children: about 9.5 hours per night. But for teens struggling with a texting addiction, getting adequate sleep at night may be a serious challenge.

As the word "sexting" began to gradually make its way into every parent’s vocabulary, we worried that racy images of our kids could get passed on to other kids and embarrass our child. But now a new buzzword – sextortion – is proving how dangerous the practice of sexting really can be.

Sextortion is shorthand for online sexual extortion. When someone posts or sends suggestive photos or video of themselves through an online medium, it can be accessed by Internet-savvy strangers.

Sexting is quickly becoming a rampant problem in high schools and junior highs. One in five teens have sent a nude or semi-nude picture of themselves to someone else’s cell phone, and one in four have seen a nude or semi-nude picture intended for someone else.

In this climate where racy self-portraits of our kids are being circulated around the school or Internet, many parents are up in arms but don’t know what to do. It’s certainly alarming, but is it illegal? Should it be?

Melinda Dennehy, a former Londonberry High School teacher, pleaded guilty to emailing nude photographs of herself to a 15-year-old male student. Dennehy, 41, of Hampstead, New Hampshire pleaded guilty to misdemeanor indecent exposure. 

In March of this year nude photos of Melinda Dennehy, then a sophomore English teacher, were passed around the high school. Dennehy resigned just three weeks after the photos surfaced. Police later determined that Dennehy sent four photos to the 15-year-old male student with her genitals exposed.

Sexting. To a parent’s ears, even the name is scary. Here are some of the straight facts about sexting, who is doing it, and why. And most importantly, how to talk to your kids about why it can be dangerous.

Sexting is using mobile technology to send a suggestive nude or semi-nude picture of oneself to someone else. It’s been around since about 15 minutes after the invention of the camera phone and the text message, but has gotten much more prevalent in recent years now that so many teens and tweens carry around their own personal cell phones.

Last month Apple finally made the move to ban sexy applications from the company's popular App Store. Female customers and parents can claim a big victory here because it was their loud and justifiable chorus of complaints that led to the change.

Apple made parental controls available last summer after parents complained of their absence on early versions of the iTouch and iPhone. But many felt that the large quantities of sexually suggestive apps for sale in the App Store was a problem as well. The recently banned applications included women in suggestive adult poses and/or barely dressed women. An estimated 5% of the 140,000 applications in the App Store were affected by the new decency standards. Noteworthy exemptions from the new policy are Playboy and Sports Illustrated's Swim Suit application.