Twitter is gaining popularity among teens, and it's different from other social networks in a lot of significant ways. If Facebook is like an after-school hangout, then Twitter is like scanning all of their favorite newspapers and magazines – as well as picking up  the latest school gossip. Here are 9 things parents should know about teenage Twitter use.

1. There is no minimum age to sign up for Twitter.

Out of every one hundred tweens and teens, how many do you think are cyberbullied? Twenty? Forty? Sixty? Actually, new research suggests that the actual figure may be much lower than we think. 

A new presentation of the results of two studies to the American Psychological Association this week shows that only 15% of kids were actually cyberbullied. The two studies surveyed a total of 5,000 teens.

Most of you reading this will think this is an impossibly low figure. We hear about cyberbullying every single day. It is all over our schools and in the news. How can a 15% figure be realistic at all?

Bullying someone in person is soooo 20th century. Cyberbullying is the new way for tweens and teens to bully, and it differs from traditional schoolyard bullying in significant ways.

Most of us know about schoolyard bullying, and have probably seen it for ourselves at some point during our journey through adolescence. Someone might have spread a dirty rumor about a classmate in the hallways at school or scrawled “For a good time call Kathy” on the inside of a bathroom stall with a Sharpie.

But cyberbullying is very different from the kind of bullying we know, for three reasons: 

1. 24/7 access. The Internet never sleeps. Cyberbullied kids live in a plugged-in world where they feel trapped and desperate because they can't escape from harassing emails, text messages, or Wall posts. They are always aware of them.

Do you think you have a pretty good idea of what your child is doing online? You may even have parental controls or parental monitoring software. Despite all the effort you go through to monitor your teen's Internet activity, your kids may still be pulling the wool over your eyes in more ways than one, a new study reveals.

The 2012 Teen Internet Behavior Study from McAfee took a closer look at the ways kids 13-17 hide their Internet activity from their parents. Teens reported that their top 10 methods included:

1. Clearing the browser history (53%)

2. Closing/minimizing browser windows when parent walked in (46%)

3. Hiding or deleting IMs or videos (34%)

With the sprawling number of cyberbullying, sexting, and faculty/predator scandals of late the Arlington County School Board is Considering a Social Media Policy applying to teachers and staff. As reported by Whitney Wild of WJLA below: 

"In the wake of scandals involving inappropriate student-teacher conduct, Arlington public schools are re-evaluating how teachers can use social media to interact with students.

Although Facebook and MySpace might be the sites that first come to mind when I say “social network,” it's really more than just that. Lots of big, popular places that your tween or teens visits frequently are actually social networks, and the same kids safety rules and precautions need to apply.

Social networking is any web-based platform that allows users to connect or interact with each other in some way. Understanding that, look beyond just Facebook and think about what other sites fall under that definition.

If you think it fits a lot of sites, you're right. Most users like to have the ability to interact with each other when they're online – hence the option to leave a comment below online news stories, for example – and many sites now offer social networking in one form or another, even if that's not their primary service.

So what does that mean? Social networks can be anything, from YouTube to Xbox live to Club Penguin. If you want to search across the most popular social networks to see if your child may have a profile there, check out uKnowSearch here and sign up for uknowkids today to find out where your child has a social network.

What? My child? A cyberbully? Never...

It's easier to believe that your tween or teen could be a victim of cyberbullying than to believe that they could actually be engaging in cyberbullying behavior.

But statistics show that cyberbullied children are also likely to be cyberbullies themselves, at least some of the time. It may be in order to get revenge or completely unintentional. Kids may not even realize that some of the 10 behaviors below are actually forms of cyberbullying:

• Forwarding personal texts or photos. Sending on a sext or a private IM conversation is mean, and it could get a child in deep trouble or even suspended from school.

• Impersonating someone else online. Cyberbullies might post as if they were another person, creating a screen name similar to theirs or actually hacking into their account and pretending to be them.

If your teen seems moody and withdrawn after spending time on a social networking site, the problem may not be cyberbullying – it could be a sign of Facebook depression.

Facebook depression is a blanket term for any depression that develops when a teen spends a lot of time on social media, comparing their lives to the posts of other people.

For some teens, social networks may end up feeling like a popularity contest where they always lose: they don't have as many friends on their buddy list, as many happy tidbits of news to tweet about, as many Kodak moments with their friends as everyone else seems to.

In fact, I felt the pull of Facebook envy when my sister-in-law sent me a link to her Flickr account. As expected, it was populated with pictures of her happy children having the time of their lives on various picture-perfect family vacations, and by the bottom of the second page I was already doubting myself as a mother.

Where were the kids with lunch leftovers on their faces throwing tempter tantrums? Where were the piles of dirty laundry, or the piles of clean laundry that never get folded and leave the basket? Was I doing something wrong?

So I can certainly see how Facebook for kids could become a depressing activity, reading about the fun parties they weren't at and looking at photo after photo of other people laughing it up with their BFFs. By immersing yourself too much in social networking, it's easy to lose perspective and measure your worst against everyone else's best.

Here are 10 signs that your child could be suffering from Facebook depression:

As a high school teacher, I often run across the road blocks my school district has set up to inhibit students from using social networking sites during class time. Much like parental controls this is tactical maneuver from schools intended to protect the students. Unfortunately it’s not unlike sticking a finger in the proverbial damn. The plethora of social media sites that high school students have access to is astounding. And which ones are popular or trendy changes on a weekly basis.

Your kids probably know, understand, and have an opinion about Twitter. Do you? Its another alternative to Facebook for kids...

Twitter is a social networking site based on the premise that you can get all the information you need to know in short bursts of 140 characters (or less) called tweets.