Digiteen

The class listened as Mr. Jenkins read a story about a girl who got annoyed when her parents quizzed her about details from her online journal. Lucas Navarrete, 13, asked, “What’s their right to read her personal stuff?” “Maybe they’re worried,” suggested Morgan Windham, a soft-spoken girl. “It’s public!” argued Aren Santos. “O.K., O.K., if it was a personal diary and they read it, would you be happy?” Lucas asked. “They have no right, see?” Mr. Jenkins asked the class if there is a difference between a private diary on paper and a public online diary. But the class could not agree. “I would just keep it to myself and tell only people that were really, really close to me,” Cindy Nguyen said after class. “We want to have our personal, private space.” That blurred line between public and private space is what Common Sense tries to address. “That sense of invulnerability that high school students tend to have, thinking they can control everything, before the Internet there may have been some truth to that,” said Ted Brodheim, chief information officer for the New York City Department of Education. “I don’t think they fully grasp that when they make some of these decisions, it’s not something they can pull back from.”

And the Internet is where children are growing up. The average young person spends seven and a half hours a day with a computer, television or smart phone, according to a January study from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Considering that the time is mostly outside of school, the results suggest that almost every extracurricular hour is devo

“You want to light a fire under someone’s fanny?” said Liz Perle, editor in chief of Common Sense Media. “Have your child post something that is close to a hate crime.”

“The messes they get into with friends, or jumping onto someone’s site and sending a message,” she said. “They don’t know, sometimes, how to manage the social, emotional stuff that comes up.”