My 12 year old niece sends me a message on skype asking me to sign up on Toondoo. When I ask her what this site is about, she says it’s a social networking site to create, share and discus comic strips. Create? Share? Discuss? At 12 years of age? I was tempted to lecture her on how dangerous the internet is.. and that she should not be signing up anywhere and everywhere.. Even before I could collect my thoughts, she points to few other sites. One that I remember is Doof, which apparently she and my nephew, who is of the same age, use to play chess from 2 different laptops and 2 different physical locations. They call it a social gaming site.

I took one look at Toondoo and must say I was mighty impressed. Though I am still not sure it is appropriate for a 12 year old, as they don’t seem to have any screening on the content published. The cartoon creator interface is very intuitive. I let D sit on the Create Your Own Cartoon interface for few minutes, was taken aback to see how the kids mind works. Within few minutes, she was dragging the images into the work area. Which created the background. She then dragged 2 humans and a monster-lookalike-something into the work area. She even had a story to tell. I resentfully refuse to go into further details..

Not too long ago, I had written a post on my daughters fascination with laptop. I must have become more tolerant and more accepting since then. I have come to accept that internet is going to be an intrinsic part of our life. Especially with families like ours, where we cannot draw a clear line on working hours. And work involves internet. More realistic approach is to let them use the internet for a certain fixed time and supervise every move of theirs. So, now she gets limited laptop time on weekends and some weekdays. I show her on the clock the time upto which she can work and I sit besides her. One day, while she was painting, Firefox crashed. She immediately clicks on the icon from the dock. The default yahoo.com opens up and the owl eyed spots an advertisement on beaches and giggles - Aunty is nangu! Another time when the browser crashed, she throws her hand up in the air and says - Laptop says times up!

D is way too young to use the internet by herself and not going to get access to any social networking site before she can spell and write Massachusetts. But, here are few tips that might be of help to parents of older kids.

- Social networking sites are much more dangerous. They let you connect with unknown others in one click, there is no accountability to what you write. Or so one might think, unless you get into trouble.

- Avoid using real names and any other details that are are give aways of residing location. Atleast until kids are of a certain age and are emotionally capable of handling trolling. Here is a good read on trolling and flaming, the link we sent to my 19 year old niece who is new and naive to the blogging world.

- Lead them to age appropriate sites and supervise every single site they visit. The biggest problem with these sites are advertisements and cross sells. That’s their ticket to monetization, no qualms on that front. But the advertisement are not always age appropriate.

- Question them on why a certain site interests them.

- Do a quick check on the site if it safe and falls under your standard of acceptable safety.

- Look at the About page. See if it is supported/backed by an established company. Established companies hire “community managers” whose sole role is to keep data clean and appropriate.

- Do a quick google search to see what everyone else says about the site. Make sure there is no negative reporting.