Note: This was written in 2007. I like to keep my old predictions around. It tends to keep me humble.

I grew up in a household without television. We didn't get our first TV until I was thirteen years old. That had its advantages. I became an avid reader rather than an avid TV watchers. It also had its disadvantages, mainly social. I didn't have the witty comeback borrowed from some sitcom. I didn't understand a lot of the references other kids made to TV shows. I caught on to clothes styles second-hand, and always trailed the rest of the kids by a crucial few weeks to a month.

I recently tried to convince a friend of mine that the Internet plays a role in a current teenager's life just as powerful as TV did when I was growing up. A teenager growing up without Internet access may be better off in some ways, but they will be somewhat isolated socially, just as I was by our family's lack of a TV. My friend responded that: “Lacking internet and e-mail access would be a social disadvantage only in societies like SF fandom.” Wrong, and good evidence he hasn't been around teenagers much lately.

I have a teenage daughter. A lot of her ‘social life’ consists of Instant Messaging, visiting friends’ MySpace sites, and e-mailing. Most of her classmates share that pattern. There are several downsides to that. Teen ‘blogs’ have become popular, many of them full of malicious gossip. Schools struggle with ‘Cyberbullying’, which is often done from home computers but spills over into schools.

Teenagers have taken to the Internet in a huge way and moved much of their communications there, away from adult eyes. For a teenager, that seems wonderful. A lot of kids don’t realize that what they say on websites and in e-mails is essentially eternal and will haunt them the rest of their lives. I predict that in twenty years you’ll see political races swayed by stuff candidates said on-line as alienated teenagers. You'll also see people having a hard time getting good jobs because of what they said on teenage blogs or MySpace sites.

So what should a parent do in terms of Internet access for teenagers? That's a tough call. Schools increasingly expect teenagers to have Internet access, and assign homework that would be difficult to do without that access. The Internet is such a powerful tool that it is hard to justify denying a teenager access to it. Doing so will isolate them from their peers and make it difficult for them to fit in socially. At the same time, a teenager (or an adult for that matter) can get themselves in an awful lot of trouble on the Internet.

It helps if a parent is able to become really computer literate, so they understand what is going on online, rather than just reacting to newspaper and magazine stories. It helps to have a good relationship with a teenager so that the teenager is able to talk about issues with their parents without fear of being punished for what they tell them. It will probably also help to have Internet access in a shared area of the house, rather than in a bedroom.

It will definitely help if a parent understands that technology is shifting some aspects of a teenager's life beyond a parent's ability to control it. That's not just because of computers or the Internet. Cell phones mean that it is very difficult to control who a teenager talks to or when. Even if your teenager doesn't have a cell phone (and are you really sure they don't?), most of their friends do, and are often willing to lend them out. Gadgets like the Playstation Portable and Video iPods in the hands of a teenager's friends means that a parent really can't control what a teenager watches, even if the parent controls the TV, the Internet, and keeps track of the DVDs in the house.

Teenagers are growing up in a different world, and parents and teachers simply can't have the kind of control many of them would like to have. That's going to have serious downsides for some teenagers as they get older, but that's simply part of the reality of life these days.