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.
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