From the Pew Research Center….

…while a majority of parents with online teens still believe the internet is a beneficial factor in their children’s lives, the number of parents who see the internet as a good thing for their children has declined since 2004.

At the same time, there has not been a corresponding increase in the percentage of parents who think the internet has been a bad thing for their children. Instead, more parents are neutral about the internet’s impact, saying it has not had an effect on their child one way or the other.   Read the entire story.

Question: Internet….Beneficial? Bad thing? No effect? All of the above?

I’m going with A and B. It’s hard to argue that the Internet has NO benefit to kids. It’s given access to a variety of new information sources. It’s given them the ability to connect socially with people all over the world. Has it also been a bad thing? Yes. It’s given predators a whole new avenue for finding and contacting young people. It’s too easy to get lost in the mass of information and never find what you’re looking for, and yes, it’s very easy to end up looking at the screen and ignoring everything else, including friends and family and work. The group that think there’s no effect one way or another….well, I just don’t know what they’re thinking.

What do you think?