The terms of use require people who use these sites to be at least 13 years old. These kids’ communities have been called training grounds for virtual worlds like Second Life and social networking sites like Facebook, which are popular with teens and young adults. The bigger picture is that Club Penguin is one of a new breed of online communities designed specifically for kids between 8 and 13 years old. They waddle around the virtual penguin world playing games, chatting with other penguins and visiting their igloos, attending parties and earning points to buy puffle pets, penguin clothes, and furnishings for their igloos. What is Club Penguin all about?Ĭlub Penguin is a virtual world where kids create an online persona, often called an avatar, in the form of a colored penguin. What do kids do on sites like Club Penguin? Are these sites safe? Are our children being bombarded with advertising when they play? Do they have any value? Should our kids be playing with virtual friends? I turned to other Penguin parents and Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online, for answers to these questions. Tweens on the Internet? As parents, we wonder if this is a good thing. What I didn’t realize then was that my daughter had homed in on a major tween Internet trend.
Minutes later she was at my side begging me to check my email messages so she could finish registering for Club Penguin.
Thinking she was just sending me an email, I told her. “Mom, what’s your email address?” my 8-year-old daughter Madison called from the computer one afternoon last spring.
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