Home About Us Media Kit Subscriptions Links Forum
EDUCATION UPDATE BLOGS
Our Digital Life: Are Parents Breaking the Rules? - Homeroom

Our Digital Life: Are Parents Breaking the Rules?

  |   Comments   |   Bookmark and Share
Facebook requires that to have an account you must be at least 13 years of age or older. It is obvious that many kids are ignoring that rule, but how many of them are being helped by their parents to lie?

A national study published this month in the peer-reviewed journal First Monday, by Danah Boyd, Eszter Hargittai, Jason Schultz and John Palfrey, shows that the parents are either misinterpreting the federally-mandated age restriction or helping their children break the law. The study included over 1,000 U.S. parents whose children are between the ages of 10 and 14.

The study found that, on average, most children joined Facebook at age 12. Thirty-six percent of these parents in the study knew that their child was joining before the legal age, and an astounding 68 percent of these parents helped their children lie in order to join the social-networking site. 

Leave a comment

Recent Entries

Promoting Financial Literacy in New York City Schools
Guest EditorialBy Anand R. Marri, Ph.D.In these increasingly complex and uncertain economic times, many of us have tested our own…
Louisville & Queens Molloy HS: The Ties That Bind
By Mike CohenIn the “x’s and o’s” world of coach-speak, and especially in big-time college basketball, sentimentality is not something…
Technology Should Support the Science of Learning – Not the Other Way Around
By Ted Hasselbring, Ed.D.Microcomputer technology was just evolving in the early 1980s when my colleague, Laura Goin, and I started…
OpenID accepted here Learn more about OpenID
Education Update, Inc. All material is copyrighted and may not be printed without express consent of the publisher. © 2011.