Social sites can give parents look at kids' lives

CHICAGO — One teenager loved to drive fast, the other boasted about his drug use, and both posted that information on MySpace.com for anyone to see.

The first, Ryan Meinken, 17, died last summer when he wrecked his sports car while driving at up to 100 mph, police said. The other, Troy Wilton, 18, was found dead in subzero weather last month after overdosing on opiates and antidepressants, authorities said. Both were from suburban Lake County, Ill., and lived a few miles apart.

Such seemingly inevitable tragedies have some experts urging parents to use social networking Web sites as an early warning system to alert them to problems from substance abuse to eating disorders to violent fantasies. But there are barriers, from squeamishness over privacy to ignorance about how to use the wildly popular sites, which include MySpace and Facebook.

"It's not a panacea, going through your child's profile ... but it can be a window into their life," said Amanda Lenhart, a research specialist with the Pew Internet & American Life Project in Washington. "It can be a conversation starter."

On his page, Meinken listed his first interest as "Driving fast and having a blast while doing so," comments that were later removed, apparently by a friend who took over the site as a memorial.

Wilton, who planned to attend Florida State University and wanted to be a filmmaker, answered "yes" to survey questions on whether he had used drugs and alcohol in the last month. His response to a question on how many drugs he had taken was "Probably more than you."

Neither family responded to requests for comment.

Experts noted that the national conversation about protecting teens from sexual predators on the sites has drawn attention away from a more mundane worry: that parents are missing very public warning signs from troubled kids who bare their souls online.

"Last year was the perfect storm of online safety concern (but) the incredible media hype was really only about predators," said Anne Collier, of Net Family News, a Salt Lake City-based nonprofit group that examines childhood and parenting in the Digital Age. "We have got to start broadening the conversation to include risks ... that will affect a great many more youngsters."

Social networking sites, which allow users to post and share personal information, pictures and opinions, have exploded in popularity. If you are a parent of a teenager with Internet access, it's more likely than not that your child has an online profile, a recent survey shows.