Posted On: January 22, 2007, 12:42 pm CST

Posted By: Voice of Experience

As a parent of a 21 yr old girl, I have had experience with her internet usage as a teen. As most teens go, she saw that any rules I set were made to be broken. I finally had to install a net nanny software to monitor her usage after I got up one night at 2:00 and saw she had gotten out of bed and was on the computer IM her "boyfriend" in NY. (We live in IA). We even moved the computer into the kitchen of our home so we could monitor her usage, but she found ways to hide what she was doing. (Supposedly working on homework but hiding her IM's in the background).

I took every opportunity to share with her that the people she was talking to could be lying about who they were. I myself had a couple of horror stories with women I met online in the early days of AOL chat rooms, so I knew what I was talking about.

Luckily everything turned out okay, but I know how easy it is for a kid to get tied into a person that shows an interest in them. Most teens have such low esteem that it only takes someone to focus on them to get them to "fall in love" with them.