No doubt you've all heard by now about the 16-year-old Michigan girl who flew to the Middle East to meet a 25-year-old man she met on www.MYSPACE.com. I am about to platform from this topic and go full circle with it.

I am currently reading Girl in the Mirror, (Snyderman & Streep 2002). Since much of what is written resonates with familiarity for me, I feel the need to share some very interesting material.

A few months back, I spoke at a Portage Board of Education meeting at which time I brought up the topic of parental monitoring of www.MYSPACE.com and AOL Instant Messenger. As my time was limited to a brief 5 minutes, I would like to take the opportunity to expand here on exactly why this is such an important topic, given our technologically advanced society today.

Did you ever think about the power of personal space? Have you ever noticed that people are much less apt to be rude the closer in proximity that they are? In fact, it's much more likely that you'll experience road rage than you will ever experience supermarket rage. The reason is that people have a certain comfort level based on distance. This is why when you ride on an elevator usually no one speaks. The personal space is just too close. The more distance, the more you open up.

This concept can similarly be transferred over and applied to the Internet. The Internet is so unlike many other forms of communication. It's unlike the phone in that there are no tonal interpretations or verbal cues, such as inflections in voice. It's unlike personal contact in that there are no facial expressions to interpret, nor is there any body language to interpret. The Internet is an entirely different type of animal, and as such, it is one that we as parents are not familiar with, as far as the implications of communication in regards to adolescent conversation is concerned.

In addition to the slang language of the Internet, such as lol, g2g, ttyl, the Internet extends to us an entirely different form in which to communicate. In Girl in the Mirror, Dr. Ilene Berson of the University of South Florida was interviewed and expounds in great detail on much of what I have stated above. Additionally, she claims that the inherent capability of the Internet allows for experimental behavior. Behaviors and attitudes that would not ordinarily be part of an everyday "real world" experience are now being explored via the Internet. So what does this mean to you and I? Well, the implications are that your children are doing and saying things that would absolutely knock your socks off if you knew. Believe me when I say that I know what I'm talking about and if you knew what I know now, you might change the way you view your child's activity on www.MYSPACE.com and AOL Instant Messenger.

Dr. Berson writes that "girls using the Internet sometimes don't see themselves as communicating with the 'real' world, but see it as a game which is permitting them to explore different things about themselves." Berson further theorizes that "some girls use the Internet to explore negative behaviors such as having sexually suggestive chats". Even further, she states that the girls who are using the Internet in more negative ways are almost universally unsupervised, and tend to be the ones who are online for an extensive period of time, increasing the likelihood of negative interactions and 'risk-taking'. Berson poses the societal questions "Is it okay to be engaging in these online fantasies?, "How will they (the chats) affect these girls' social and emotional development?" and "How will the nature of communication on this new medium affect our children?"

Well, I believe that I have the answers to these questions.

Back in 2003, I allowed my daughter to download AOL instant messenger. She was just 13 years old and in the 8th grade. She told me that 'everyone else was using it', and so I agreed. I could never have imagined the ultimate power that I was handing over to a 13 year old girl.

When she was just 15 years old, my daughter started dating a 15 year old boy who she met on the Internet. He was a friend of a friend. Although they only saw each other in person about a dozen times, they chatted and emailed each other numerous times daily over the course of approximately 3 months. Although our computer is in the middle of our home, I let my daughter have free reign to use it at will. She spent an inordinate amount of time at the computer and although it did concern me, I allowed her to continue as it seemed to be one of the few things that really made her happy.

Based on Dr. Berson's interview, you can put the pieces together to figure out what happened next. The girl who wore the I'm worth waiting for pin, which she'd received from Teen Heart, could never live up to her Internet fantasy life, and in the end, the 2 ½ month long relationship was abruptly ended via an instant message. That was on or about November 3^rd, 2005. On December 4^th, 2005, after a late night and into the morning online instant message conversation with her ex-boyfriend, my 15 year old daughter, Kristina Calco, committed suicide.