Social networks, blogs, photo sharing; there are many ways teens can communicate with friends and family online.

Unfortunately, there are also crafty strangers, including drug dealers, who want to communicate with your teen.

These people may initially seem to be harmless individuals, lure your teen in by gaining their trust, and then start encouraging risky behavior by sending links to pro-drug sites, notices of parties and so on.

A search on MySpace.com, a social networking site used by millions of teens, turns up tens of thousands of people writing openly about marijuana.

[Image is from a MySpace.com profile.]

Teens can even upload pro-marijuana quizzes, such as the one shown on this page, without a second thought about the damage it could do to their futures.

One of a parent’s biggest challenges today is simply knowing what children are doing while plugged into the Internet, which is often hours at a time.

In today’s digital world, the Internet is accessible not only by computers, but also through cell phones, personal digital assistant (PDAs) and gaming devices.

With so much access, it’s important for parents to know that 62 percent of online teens say that most teens do things online that they wouldn’t want their parents to know about.

If you feel like you could do a better job of monitoring your teen’s media use, you are not alone. A majority of parents (65 percent) feel they could do a better job supervising their children’s media use.

Article continued on theantidrug.com