Not just Net safety

It's almost the West Coast version of the case Det. Frank Dannahey in Connecticut emailed me about: the story of 14-year-olds Valerie and Stuart and how their online socializing turned into a nightmare for Valerie's family, as told by the Petaluma (Calif.) Argus-Courier. Except that, fortunately, Valerie wasn't victimized by self-created and peer-distributed child pornography. She and her family were "only" the recipients of online threats never acted upon. But the article does a great job of laying out multiple perspectives on struggles over teen cybersocializing, at home and at school. Petaluma City Schools have identified Internet safety as a "major issue," seeing that merely filtering school computers is far from enough and that schools need to help educate parents in this area. The story also illustrates the role that social skills and street smarts are playing in kids' well-being online and how the Internet is demanding these of children at very young ages. For the view from Tennessee, see "Youngsters fuel the online journal boom" at Tennessean.com.