Having a 14 year old myself who enjoys social networking; this is very worrying. Are parents meant to ban these sites or is there anything specific that we should look out for?

On a typical day, 70 percent of teens ages 12 to 17 -- 17 million teenagers -- spend from a minute to hours on Facebook, Myspace and other social networking sites, according to The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University. But for this same age bracket, social-network-savvy teens are five times more likely to use tobacco; three times more likely to use alcohol; and twice as likely to use marijuana than teens who do not spend any of their day on social networking sites.

Results revealed that half of teens who spend any time social networking in a given day have seen pictures of kids "drunk, passed out, or using drugs on these sites."

Teens who had seen such pictures were also more than twice as likely to think they would try drugs in the future, and much more likely to have friends who used illegal drugs.

Sites such as Facebook and Myspace have been asked to curb the use of such images, but ultimately, it is up to parents to monitor what our teenagers are doing. However, I will be discussing these statistics with my teenage son so that he is very aware of this research and how it could affect him.



Patricia Wakeford

Solicitor - Clinical negligence Team.