With a few exceptions, most of the parents I know are less informed about Facebook for kids than their 13 year olds. If you have Facebook for kids of your own, there are 10 important things you need to know about how to keep your kids safe on Facebook– whether or not you have an account yourself.

1. Facebook's default privacy settings are probably more public than you'd like. Facebook guards the information on minors a little better than the general population, but you'll still need to review your child's privacy settings and manually reset the security to “friends only” or tighter.

Yesterday my kindergartener came home and told me how much fun she had using the iPad at school. Their teacher taught them how to use an app that helped them draw letters in the proper sequence with their fingers. 

Lots of school districts are using iPads, Twitter, or Skype in the classroom. It's a bit of a debate, but I generally agree with integrating new technologies into education. Facebook and iPads are great mediums for educators to use to connect with their students, because these tools are inevitably going to be – and sometimes already are – an integral part of these kids' lives. Googling is a skill I think needs to be learned along with looking things up in a dictionary or encyclopedia.

It may not happen until your child is 16, or it could happen as early as 6 – sooner or later, he is going to ask you for a cell phone. And when your child does, how are you going to answer? Your child's safety is a big deal, especially on a mobile phone, and you might want to consider parental monitoring or parental controls.

A cell phone, especially a smart phone, is a big responsibility. Here are 8 indicators that your child is ready to handle one. 

1. He has shown responsibility with other big-ticket personal items

We hear a lot about Facebook for kids and age these days. Mark Zuckerburg himself has said that he thinks the age minimum of 13 should be lifted. And plenty of kids as young as 9 and 10 are on Facebook nothwithstanding the age minimum, some of them with mom and dad's full approval.

 But here are 10 safety reasons that your preteen should not be on Facebook:

1. Helping your preteen create a Facebook account is helping them lie about their age to skirt the 13-year-old age minimum. Not only are you teaching your child that you think it's okay to fudge the truth sometimes, you're setting a dangerous precedent that if you think you know better than the rule, you can break it.

Cyberbulling is a particularly destructive, intense form of bullying that can devastate a teen or tween who becomes a victim. Adults can be cyberbullied, too, but if we can gather anything from the deluge of suicides in the last few years due to recurring cyberbullying, it's that cyberbullied teens and tweens are the ones particularly crippled by the effects of online bullying.

Statistics back up this particularly grim picture of cyberbullying and how it's impacted by age. The Pew Internet and American Life Project found in a July study of 799 families that 20% of teens say that their peers are “mostly unkind” online. Another 11% said that “it depends.” On the other hand, adults ages 18 and older says that only 5% of their peers are “mostly unkind” online.

Cell phones have changed everything in our kids' schools, including the way they cheat. The old ways of cheating (tiny crib sheets or notes written on the arm in ink) have been replaced with a new kind of digital cheating. Cell phones are tiny, ubiquitous, and easy to hide – and 1 in 3 kids say they've used their cell phones to cheat at least once in school. Do schools need to adopt some kind of parental controls?

Cheaters have a myriad of options when they've got a cell phone, particularly a smart phone, at their disposal. They can store notes, text friends for answers, search the Internet for answers, or take pictures of the test and forward it to friends who haven't taken it yet.

 Ever wonder what productive and yet still fun things you and your child can do on Facebook for kids and social media in general? Here is a list of 5 things your kids can do safely on social networks to prepare for having their own account.

1. Create family photo albums:

What better way to keep your distant relatives up-to-date on your family's activities?

At this week's book club meeting, the parents in the room were bemoaning how much our teenagers text. For those of us who are used to using the good old landline phone (bonus points if yours was not cordless), it can almost seem ridiculous. New dangers and scares for parents include sexting, cyberbullying, and everything in between.

One of the moms exclaimed. “My daughter will spend half an hour texting her friends back and forth to coordinate a school project when a 5-minute phone call would clear everything right up!” Our kids just text a lot – some statistics say that the average teen sends and receives over 3,000 texts per month.

Do you feel that your teen is truly texting too much? It can be hard to get perspective on what's normal for a teen, since we didn't grow up with the option of texting anytime, anywhere. Try talking to other parents to get a feel for what's normal for your child and her peers.

Even though it's not smart, a lot of teens are sexting. That is, they're sending nude or suggestive  pictures of themselves to each other on their cell phones. Though sexting is still a bad idea for a lot of reasons, parents in Florida should know that sexting laws that could affect their kids have changed.

Under the old law, any minor possessing or distributing a sext where the subject is under age 18 could be prosecuted as a sex offender. The new law, however, is much more lenient. What happens now when a teacher or parent finds and reports a sext on a child's phone?

Friending kids on Facebook helps you to stay connected and keep them safe from danger. But many kids feel trepidation about friending their parents.

Many parents who approve of Facebook for kids like to "friend" their kids to do a little parental monitoring. Doing something annoying or embarrassing might mean that you get unfriended, so use these tips to be a good Facebook friend to your child:

1. Pick your battles. If you are going to be Facebook friends with your child, it's pretty much guaranteed that you're not going to like everything they post. If you want to remain friends, don't mention the little infractions (their use of certain 4-letter words, for example) and stick to the big issues where their safety is really at stake (cyberbullying, sexting, dangerous friends, or sharing sensitive information.)