Online social networks drawing more, younger children

Children are participating in growing numbers in online social sites like Facebook and Twitter at increasingly younger ages, says a study led by the University of Toronto's Sara Grimes. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, says Grimes, an assistant professor at U of T's Faculty of Information. Results show that kids between the ages of five and 13 are largely enjoying their forays into networked games, virtual worlds like Whyville, and project sharing sites such as scratch.mit.edu —online forums that might not look like your typical social network, but essentially serve many of the same functions. "Children express an enormous amount of creativity, self-expression, identity development, desire to connect with friends and family and eagerness to learn in their interactions with social technologies," says Grimes, who conducts research on the regulatory and ethical dimensions of children's digital media, children's play and creativity and digital games. Grimes and Deborah Fields, an assistant professor at Utah State University, released Kids online: A new research agenda for understanding social networking forums, a report conducted for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop , an independent, non-profit research center that fosters innovation in children's learning through digital media. This paper is the first comprehensive study to identify and explain some of the most pressing questions about kids' rapid adoption of online social media.