Mom and Dad delight in rediscovering old chums.  High-schooler James uses it to make plans, publish goofy photos and check out the hotties who are friends of friends.  But now 10-year-old Abigail wants her own Facebook page.  Should you let her?

Both Facebook and MySpace require users to be thirteen, but…come on.  Site administrators may not know that a portion of their users still have American Girl dolls languishing on their beds and, even if they care, will likely not find out.  Is this a bad thing? Opinions from experts fall all over the map, as CNN found out when it recently raised the question.

Kaveri Subrahmanyam, a professor psychology at California State University-Los Angeles is okay with kiddies having profiles:  “For the most part, although there’s so much press about all the bad things they’re doing, much of what they do on these sites is stuff they would be doing anyway.”

“You’ll always have the small minority of kids who are not using it appropriately,” she said. “I do think you’re going to have a few people that are doing things that kids probably couldn’t do with telephones a generation ago.

“But we don’t want to get swept away by the general fear. It’s here, and it’s pretty harmless.”

Susan Greenfield, an Oxford University neuroscientist and director of Britain’s Royal Institution isn’t so sure kids will emerge unscathed after using these sites too early in life.   She believes that our kids run the risk of “infantilizing” the brain, resulting in an increasingly short attention span.

Some therapists have even warned that pre-adolescent use of these sites could pave the way to a full blown 12-step-worthy internet addiction come adulthood.

One thing not up for debate is the fact that the number of younger kids who are actively using these sites are growing each day.

And so, proving yet again that there is no trend in the universe that someone, somewhere, won’t capitalize on, a growing number of networking sites have sprung up that are targeted directly at the training bra set.  Disney’s Club Penguin is primarily a gaming site, but has a few social functions.   Web Kinz and  Whyville feature restricted and supervised networking.

So how young is too young?  10?  8?

Read the whole story here.

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