Parenting & profile deletion

Some parents will be relieved to read that every week MySpace deletes the profiles of about 30,000 people under 14 (14 is the minimum age under its Terms of Service). In an article about parenting MySpacers, the Boston Globe leads with that factoid. The thing relieved parents need to know, though, is that a deleted profile is far from the resolution of any parent's social-networking struggle, especially if his or her child is a determined online socializer. For a teen, getting one's profile deleted - after putting significant time and effort into cultivating page esthetics and friends' comments - is a major pain. But a new account can be set up, in stealth mode (set to private and harder for a parents to find), very quickly, after which the development period starts anew, usually with friends rallying around the effort. So account deletion by MySpace is never the ultimate goal. Parent/child communication and learning are more realistic ones, often with parents learning about both the technology and their kids' social lives and with kids learning about how to protect and present themselves better in public places, not to mention why their parents have concerns. I appreciated the points made by a psychology professor and a middle-school administrator quoted by Globe writer Barbara Meltz. Meanwhile, some fresh statistics from Harris Interactive (as reported in Media Life): 75% of teens and 43% of tweens have an online profile in a social-networking or community site, and teens have, on average, 75 friends on their friends lists in such sites.