ARTICLES: The young and the restless

While teens happily barrel along the information highway, parents are setting up a few roadblocks.

Children aged eight to 18 seem to be surgically attached to their phones these days, absorbed in a digital world far removed from physical boundaries, and often parental ones too. But parents are getting increasingly concerned, and clued up, about thevirtual playgrounds their children are frequenting.

Heather Hansen, who runs educational workshops on Internet safety at Teenworx, says while children have the digital world at their fingertips, they don't necessarily know how to use it. “We're asked to go into schools and sometimes children as young as Grade Four (nine to 10 years old) have access to BlackBerrys, which is stressful for them because they have all this technology and aren't sure what to do with it.”

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