Social Web Sites Invite Younger Kids to Network

NEW YORK – This past spring, 10-year-old Adam Young joined other tweens on Club Penguin, playing games, throwing virtual snowballs and chatting with fellow kids who appear onscreen as plump cartoon penguins. A few weeks later, Adam asked Mom to pay $5 a month for extra features, such as decorating his online persona’s igloo.

Karen Young demanded to learn more about what some have billed as “training wheels” for the next MySpace generation. She spent time on the site with Adam and consulted with her sister, the mother of another daily visitor.

“I said, ‘Well, what is it? What does it involve?’” Ms. Young recalled. “I wanted him to show me what he wanted and what it was about.”

Drawing preteens as young as 6 or 7, sites such as Club Penguin and Webkinz are forcing parents to decide at what age they are willing to let their children roam about and interact with friends online. They, along with schools, are having to teach earlier lessons on safety, etiquette and balance with offline activities.

According to comScore Media Metrix, U.S. visitors to Club Penguin nearly tripled over the past year, while Webkinz’s grew 13 times.

Peggy Meszaros, a professor of human development at Virginia Tech, said kids’ identities begin to blossom by 8 and they start wanting to meet other children, so these sites may become their introduction to social networking. But she said kids that age would get much more “going to the swimming pool and meeting friends face to face,” making parental oversight of online usage ever- important.

Ms. Young, a first-grade teacher in Louisville, Ky., deemed the environment relatively safe and agreed to pay for a membership. Unlike News Corp.’s MySpace, the anything-goes site frequented by Ms. Young’s older son, Club Penguin limits what children can say to one another, reducing the risks of predators and online bullying.

Club Penguin, from Canada’s New Horizon Interactive Ltd., does not try to keep out older users – after all, anyone can lie about age. Rather, it builds in controls meant to curb outside contact and harassment. The company says it has never had a problem with predators.

Parents can choose an “ultimate safe” mode, meaning chat messages sent and received are limited to prewritten phrases, such as “How are you today?”

In the standard mode, kids can type messages like any other chat program, but only the sender sees messages containing foul language and even innocent-sounding words such as “mom” – to prevent someone from asking, “Is your mom home?” Senders would think they are being ignored and not try tricks to bypass filters.

The filters also catch numbers that might form a phone number a kid is trying to share, even if someone tries to replace “1″ with “one.”

Although these social-networking precursors for tweens tend to incorporate more safety measures than MySpace, Facebook and other sites geared toward teenagers and adults, experts warn that parents can’t simply sign their kids on and leave them there, especially during the summer months when kids have more time to spend online.

(c) 2007 Augusta Chronicle, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.