Underage Kids on Facebook

I've seen a lot of blog posts and journal articles on "underage" children joining Facebook in the past two days. Based on legal requirements, Facebook requires a user be 13 years old or older in order to create an account. But all kids have to do is change the year of their birth and, with no verification in place on Facebook's end, they have their very own Facebook account... usually without Mom and Dad's knowing. This was the original post I read from School Library Journal. This was another one I read this morning about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg vowing to "fight" the minimum age requirement at some point. The nutshell statistics: 7.5 million kids under the 13 year old age requirement are on Facebook. And lest you think it's mainly middle schoolers almost at the age requirement, 5 million of those kids are 10 and under.

Working with tweens, I've come across kids who want to join Facebook as well as parents debating whether to let their kids join. There are numerous concerns: privacy settings, prevalence of viruses, predators, cyber bullying and more. Facebook can be a great communication tool, but it can also cause a lot of problems! But I think one of the biggest things is that tweens see older friends, siblings or parents on and it looks "fun"... they think it's all quizzes, games and making doodles over their self-portrait pictures. They don't realize that there are over 500 million users world-wide on this fun site, who have less-than-fun motives. They have no concept of "perspective."

So I'm curious as to what parents think... Would you let your child on Facebook and at what age? Do you think it's a big fuss over nothing? The exact age is up to a parent's discretion (although law is law), but as someone who works with kids and has a masters in Information Science, my concern is that kids have no idea how to safely use the mass, unwieldy, potential danger zone of the world wide web safely.  So to that end, we're planning on a program in the fall for parents and kids on internet safety. In the meantime, check out the information from the State Attorney General's office: Tips for Parents on preventing cyber bullying, Internet Safety and Netiquette Techniques, and a PDF on protecting kids and teens online.

I think the takeaways from all this mass download of information and links I'm throwing out is that 1) Parents need to know it happens. I personally know underage kids who've joined Facebook without their parents' consent (actually, they were told "no") and the parent had no clue. And 2) Whether for Facebook or the internet in general, kids need to learn about internet safety and cyber-bullying. I hope this information's helped and please check out the information I linked to as you have time. The library does have a regularly occuring Social Networking Computer Class for adults (if you're clueless about it and need to know to help your children.) It's actually happening on Thursday at 10am! Contact us if you're interested. And we'd love to know if people would be interested in a program in the Fall for parents and children on Cyber-bullying and Internet Safety.