In Growing Up Online, FRONTLINE takes viewers inside the very public private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming childhood. “The Internet and the digital world was something that belonged to adults, and now it’s something that really is the province of teenagers, ” says C.J. Pascoe, a postdoctoral scholar with the University of California, Berkeley’s Digital Youth Research project.

“We do need to teach our children digital literacy. They need to know how to keep themselves safe online; they need to think about the information that they’re putting out there; and they need to be able to have discussions with their parents about it.” C.J.Pascoe

“You have a generation faced with a society with fundamentally different properties, thanks to the Internet,” says Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “It’s a question for us of how we teach ourselves and our children to live in a society where these properties are fundamentally a way of life. This is public life today.”

FRONTLINE has developed materials for teachers, parents and kids to accompany Growing Up Online. These resources include downloadable viewing guides for parent and for teachers that includes a seven-part discussion question section, lesson plans for the classroom, resources for building parent-teen online engagement, and a Cyberquiz: “What Kind of Cyber Guide are You?” that explores parents’ media management styles.