WIRED:Understanding teenagers' internet habits is not as difficult as some parents think, writes DANNY O'BRIEN

ONE OF the awkward things about being a so-called internet expert is the expectation that you are also an expert on everything that intersects even slightly with it. It’s a little like a telephone engineer being repeatedly asked to comment on brain surgery because word got out that surgeons sometimes chat on the phone.

Case in point: recently I was asked to speak to a group of parents at a local school about kids and internet safety. Terrified, I burnt the midnight oil reading up on the latest research on teenagers, kids and internet usage. When I finally met my fellow parents, I realised we were all learning.

The first thing I learned is adults now know more about this topic than they think they do. The net is not a mystery, and neither is childhood. Most of us have now spent at least a few years on the internet and, despite almost of all of us claiming we barely understand it, we’ve subconsciously sucked up a lot in that time. We’ve also all been children.

And despite all our net boosterism, being a teenager in 2009 isn’t that much different from 1989 – or 1889 for that matter. It’s a time when peers are important, when impulsiveness rules, and when we’re all a little paranoid and narcissistic.

The first thing parents need to understand about teenagers’ net use is that it’s really not that much different from parents’ net use: it’s just about the things that teenagers do, rather than adults.

That explains, for instance, the huge priority of instant messaging (IM) over other forms of net communication, like e-mail. We experts thought for a while that perhaps everyone would move to IM, as the e-mail-using generation grew old and died. As it turns out, though, IM is still far more prevalent among teenagers, even as the first generation of IMing teens grows into their 20s and uses it less.

The truth is that IMing is a good fit for what teenagers do: meet up with their peers and “hang out”. Think of the net in this context as like a local mall or shopping centre. There’s not much going on, but there’s a lot of casual communication that has little content but affirms that you’re friends.

That’s what all that hanging out on Twitter and Facebook and Bebo represents.

But what about the threats to children – like the threat of handing out too much personal information, and thus becoming a victim of all those internet sex predators? Talking to teens and parents, it becomes apparent that both understand the risks here. Schools and sensational journalism have made it clear that you shouldn’t give out your address, or run off with strangers.

Meanwhile, kids online are almost exclusively chatting to their peers, or friends of their peers. The stranger who blunders in is almost instantly suspected of being some “creepy old perv”.

But if kids know well enough not to hand out their address, they still haven’t quite got an idea of the ramifications of some of their online shenanigans.

Facebook and MySpace profiles are full of pictures of young adults posing with beer bottles, smoking or posing suggestively – pictures that in the context of a college or job application take on a very different appearance. But perhaps we should not be too harsh: as I write, a British headmistress is in the headlines for the same all-too-revealing, all-too-inappropriate Facebook postings.

There are parts of teenage life that we who grew up without the net have little experience of – and our children are reticent to teach us. Cyber-bullying is something that many kids have some knowledge of, and yet rarely talk about to adults. That silence is because of the humiliation of bullying, and because kids are (often rightly) worried that adults will downplay the upsetting and pervasive nature of online taunting.

Bullying in many parents’ minds is so strongly associated with physical abuse, that the idea that kids can do it long-distance using just words seems unworthy of real concern.

As anyone who has experienced a flame-war online knows, words can hurt, no matter the distance, particularly for children who are going through a particularly sensitive period in their life. Cyberbullying is different from physical bullying, but just as potentially damaging to a child’s view of the world.

And cyberbullies are a different kind of kid, too: more likely to be the quieter, “better-behaved” child, rather than the traditional rambunctious thug.

Perhaps one of the internet threats we parents should keep a look out for is the possibility that our own studious children are doing the bullying, rather than being the bullied. If you think of the traditional playground scene of a gang of cruel schoolchildren picking on one lonely kid, and then map that on to the internet, you can see that, absent all other factors, the statistical chances mean your son or daughter is more likely to be a bully than the bullied.

On the internet that ratio is leaning even more to the bully than the bullied.

That’s an uncomfortable thought. But then, perhaps the first step to making the net safe for our kids is to understand what makes them feel unsafe, and not what makes us feel uncomfortable.