For kids, friendships that click

The same girl used the website MySpace to see what school friends had been up to over the summer so she could talk to them about it when school began.

Having that information made her daughter more socially confident, she says.

There's no question that kid-networking can have a downside. Accumulating hundreds of screen names and addresses and spending afternoons communicating with their owners leads to bigger virtual communities, but psychologist Thompson fears "it also contributes to the loss of actual neighborhoods. Why deal with your neighbors, whom you don't 'love,' when you can e-mail a close friend?"

An 18-year-old girl tells the story of a friend who changed her image when she changed schools in eighth grade. Using e-mail, she contacted new schoolmates and got old ones to e-mail them with glowing remarks about her. By the time school began, she had taken on the "cool" persona she'd always wanted.

Sherri Rapaport, a Brentwood mother of four, worries because "online friendship doesn't involve much personal interaction, which means the kids don't learn how to relate to each other eye to eye. It's easier to hide behind the Internet. To exaggerate. To lie."

And Internet socializing can and too often has turned ugly. In an extreme case several years ago, an eighth-grade girl in the Washington, D.C., area was targeted on a Web bulletin board by a schoolmate who used obscenity-laced put-downs and eventually urged her to kill herself.

Some websites that focus on school-based gossip, scandal and slander have been closed down, but plenty still exist.

On one, a recent posting by an L.A. high school student is littered with expletives and uses the real name of the person being targeted.

But a clear majority of the kids who responded to the Pew survey insisted that Internet use "helped" their relationships with their friends. As many parents agreed that use was largely positive.

"It takes the old concept of pen pals to new levels," says Deborah Rozansky, mother of Rachel Berkowitz, who notes that her daughter sometimes "is online with friends -- and friends of friends -- who live in Australia, Europe and America, all at the same time."

And "what a boon for the shy and awkward," says Thompson. "It allows them a way into the conversation."

That point may be moot: All agree that kids to the modem born will never give up their networks.

"It's changed the social scene completely," says Rapaport. She sounds almost wistful. "The phone doesn't ring so much anymore."