Today I posted a comment in response to Mark Glaser's post on the PBS blog Media Shift about how much technology and social media teens are using -- is it too much? Is it dangerous and isolating? Mark did a great job at breaking down the upside and the downside to being totally wired, but I wanted to reprint my comment here about the different parenting styles I encountered while writing the book and what I hope will be "the third way" or an approach adopted by as many parents, teachers and adults in general as possible. Here's what I said:

The parents I interviewed for my book Totally Wired (out March 20) generally fall into three camps:

1) Those who want to just turn it off - especially if they've had a negative incident with MySpace or IM, they may forbid the use of this social media. Otherwise, they've read the coverage, believe the predator hype or don't see all of the positive potential of using technology (outside of just doing homework) and want to force their kids to unplug. These parents will block, filter and limit teen internet use severely.

2) Those who set no limits (see no evil, hear no evil...) - These parents are either not Internet savvy and have no idea what their teens are doing online or believe their teens know more than they do about the technology and therefore just trust them to make the right decisions about how to use it. They are hands off...often until something happens (another parents tells them about something inappropriate on their teen's MySpace profile, etc.). The problem here is that they are abidicating the responsibility of having any real discussion of online ethics, media literacy or information literacy.

3) Parents who get it - They know their teens may know more about how to use technology or certain websites than they do, so they ask their teens to show them what they're doing, what sites they visit and how they work, and in the process, open up a dialogue. Throughout this discussion they are reinforcing their values about how to be online (something they can teach teens) - how to treat other people online ethically, what it means to have a public site, being media literate and critical of what they see, their views of online pornography, etc. They may insist the computer is in a central space and set healthy limits that encourage teens to unplug, but they are not dependent on software or technology to parent for them.

In my mind, those of us who are active around these issues should be pushing hard to help educate and cultivate the third type of parent -- to close the gap that is widening between teens and their parents as a result of teens being "totally wired" (and in their own digital worlds) and take advantage of this moment in time to open up a conversation that ultimately will bring parents and teens closer together.