Parents (and schools) need to chill out.

In 2005, Senator Hillary Clinton proposed codifying videogame ratings and making it illegal for stores to sell M-rated games to people under age 18. Today, some secondary schools ban social networking not only to free up their limited computer resources for more studious activities, but also because they fear that students will post personal information. If they're allowed to create their own content and publish it online with school computers, schools fear that they'll be tricked into meeting or be kidnapped by a child molester.

Some secondary schools even ban Wikipedia because they think that minors take everything at face value and are thus vulnerable to Wikipedia's supposed unreliability. It was feared that a 2006 bill would have required all schools that receive federal funding to prohibit Websites that allow students to publish their own content, like Wikipedia, but the Internet community may have simply overreacted and and overstated the bill's scope.

The thing is, even though schools and helicopter parents often fail to teach kids to not accept everything they learn as fact, kids are pretty sensible and can filter out poor and inaccurate information, and know better than to fall victim to online sexual predators. Though more violent kids may be more drawn to violent videogames than less violent kids, there's no evidence to suggest that kids absorb the violence they're exposed to in fictional videogames and recreate it in the real world. Kids aren't dumb sponges who unquestionably believe everything they're told by their teachers, friends, and parents, and read in Wikipedia, Britannica, and school textbooks.

Fortunately, I think a backlash against overbearing schools and helicopter parenting is just beginning, and it's about time. Moral panics only last for so long.