Given the number of teens participating in a sexting incident – approximately 25% by the time they leave high school – sexting is every bit the plague-like phenomenon the media makes it out to be. Sexting is the taking and sending of racy pictures or sending racy texts to someone else. For those of us parents who didn't grow up with camera phones, the biggest question about sexting might be: Why?

There are many reasons why kids sext each other. They might do it to get attention, to flirt, as a thoughtless impulse, or even as a joke.

Kids today keep track of their homework assignments, their schedules, and their lives in general on social networks. Just one more reason for parents to keep an eye on their teen's Facebook and MySpace pages.

When kids want to plan a party or organize a group study session, the event is often planned via social networking sites. The message can be sent to multiple friends at a time and the response is much quicker than they could expect with texts or phone calls. Social networking is one of the most convenient ways for kids to plan out their day.

This past April was National Child Abuse Prevention Month. The month was dedicated to raising awareness about child abuse and, more importantly, to preventing it. The Internet adds a new dimension to child abuse, as children of all ages can become victims of online pedophiles and child pornography.

Protect your child by addressing the issue of child pornography early. No one – including smart kids, good kids, or happy kids – is exempt from the possibility of being victimized. Being informed is the only protection your kids have. Teach your child to avoid becoming a victim of a child predator or exploiter by:

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.

In cyberspace, things rarely stay private. A nude picture, snarky comment, or reference to illegal drugs or underage drinking meant for a friend’s eyes only can easily be seen by a teacher, employer, parent, stranger, or the entire high school.

In an effort to underline the need for more caution in posting information online, the non-profit Ad Council has produced a series of public service announcements with the tagline “If you wouldn’t wear it, don’t share it.”

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.

Designed for ages 6 to 14, Club Penguin is a virtual world where kids can play games, earn virtual currency, customize their world, and interact with each other in a kid-friendly environment.

Club Penguin Overview

Kids roam the cartoon world of Penguin Island in the form of colorful penguin avatars, playing games to earn virtual coins which are used to “buy” new clothes, furniture, and other extras to decorate and customize their avatars, their igloos, and furry little pets called “Puffles.”

When a child’s identity is stolen and impersonated, it’s hard to detect. Children and teens are still years away from using their social security number to get jobs, apply for colleges, open credit cards, or get mortgages – so fraud involving their identity can go undetected for years. Precisely for that reason, children and teenagers are a favorite target of identity thieves.

Of course you should still shred important documents and bring in the mail right away, but today’s identity thieves are less likely to be sifting through trash or stealing mail when they can get the information they need from our kids in Internet chat rooms or through phishing emails.

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!

Older studies reported that the age of the average online gamer was somewhere in the 40s. But now, the age of the average gamer is 32. What does this mean? It means that tweens are entering the mix – and they’re most likely yours.

The overwhelming majority of tweens are online, navigating their ways through virtual worlds. 91% of boys and 93% of girls ages 8 to 11 report playing online games, up dramatically from just five years ago.

Thanks to the Internet, information is easier to get than ever. Kids can get online to do their homework, learn how to apply to college, or find out how long it takes Saturn to make a revolution around the sun.

Of course, when information is so easy to get it can be a little scary. Try Googling a phrase like “how to kill yourself,” “homemade bomb instructions,” or “play the choking game” and you’ll find a scary assortment of search results.

Sort of a Tamagotchi-Pokémon hybrid, Neopets is an online game where players earn and spend virtual Neopoints to customize and care for up to 4 colorful cartoon animals.

Neopets launched in 1999 as a gaming site for bored college students, and today there are more teens and adults on Neopets than there are on comparable sites like Webkinz or Club Penguin.

After registering (kids under 13 must do so with a parent’s email), players can buy clothes, food, toys, and even houses for their Neopets. They can also track their Neopet’s stats as they train it to fight other virtual animals in the Battledome.

In December at an FCC conference in Washington, D.C., the LG Text Education program got recent attention. So I thought I’d check it out.

Usually I’m dubious about corporate-sponsored campaigns that are supposedly for the “public good.” After all, LG is a mobile phone manufacturer and their motivation is to sell their products and services, not protect our kids’ best interests.

The newest Nintendo game console is anticipated to arrive this spring, and it’s pretty different from other gaming systems on the market. Without the aid of glasses, Nintendo claims to create 3-dimensional effects in its new portable 3DS console.

But it’s not for kids under 6, Nintendo warns, because it could potentially damage their vision.

Around 50% of teens admit to texting while driving, and that’s a really scary thought for parents who have a new driver in the house.

Teens are already the riskiest class of drivers. They are inexperienced, exhibit slower reaction times, and often aren’t paying attention to much other than the car in front of them. Teens also think they are invincible, not imagining that unsafe behavior can hurt them or someone else.

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.

Given the proliferation of teen gamers out there, Yale researchers were curious about what types of behaviors gaming was most often associated with. Out of the 4,028 respondents in the study, 2,064 of them (51.2%) reported playing at least an hour of video games per week. Here’s what they found about those kids.

• Boys were much more likely (76.3%) to be gamers than girls (29.2%)

• Gaming was significantly more prevalent in Asians and students with lower grades

• Different behaviors were typical for male gamers versus female gamers

One of the most interesting parts of the study was that boys who played video games were more likely to have higher GPAs, never smoke, or never use marijuana. Aside from high caffeine consumption, there were no risky health behaviors associated with male gaming.

You don’t need an expert to tell you that you lived a different childhood than your kids do. You remember when you had to get up and turn the dial on the TV to change channels; your teen can’t understand how a world without Facebook or MySpace would even function.

You perceive everything differently than your child, and that includes the very nature of social networking.

As adults and non-Facebook natives, we naturally approach social networking with more caution and more discretion. We are well aware that it is a public activity. We parents are more likely to view Facebook as more of a billboard-type communication than a conversation with a friend. But do our kids?