"Totally Wired" Offers Parents Realistic View, Advice

I caught up with Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired. If you're a parent looking for a reasoned, wide-angle view of teens, tech, and how they present themselves and communicate online and via cell phones, this book is required reading.

Goodstein has worked with teens, keeps daily track of marketing and media related to teens on her blog, YPulse, and has vivid memories of being a teen. She couples all that with the most up-to-date research and interviews with teens, parents, and educators in Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens are Really Doing Online for one of the least alarming and realistic takes on today's teens and how they use technology.

Robin Raskin reviews Goodstein's book in this post, and I talked to her about some of the main takeaways she hopes parents reap from her work. The main one is that the stories that dominate the media about online predators making contact with teens via the net are far from the norm. She cites stats that violent crime in the U.S. has dropped 38 percent since 1975, and that out of 800,000 cases of kids reported missing every year, only 150 are kidnappings by strangers. Most teens, Goodstein writes, are like Sylvia, a teen she interviewed, who said: "I've never made a friend online who I've never met before. I would just feel too uncomfortable about it."

"Part of my message and the message of the book is it's not the technology per se," Goodstein says. "Teens are teens doing all of the things they have always done. Looking for validation. Figuring out who they are. And they're doing that by expressing themselves by how they decorate their profile pages, their buddy icons. They want to stay in touch with their friends just as they always have, but now they have a new set of digital tools to do that."

Those tools can be frightening to parents who are not familiar or comfortable with them. So another of Goodstein's messages to parents is to dive in and learn about them. Ask your kids to show you how to set up a profile, or choose an avatar to represent you online. As you widen the door to their online lives, then you can help them set boundaries. Help them figure out how to balance their time online with the rest of their lives, and make good judgments about what they say and the images they post online. "You don't have to know technology to explain how everything works," she says. "That's just being a parent."

Goodstein doesn't sugarcoat the negative of the painfully public side of teen expression: the cyberbullying that takes place, the forums for teens to support each other in destructive behavior, such as anorexia. But the more parents learn about what teens are doing online, the more we can help guide them through this very public world.

"It's such a big part of their lives now, online and offline," Goodstein says. "If they (parents) don't engage, they're missing out on a huge part of their kids' lives."

Good advice. And there's lots more, about 200 pages of it, in Totally Wired.