What parents are supposed to do is protect their children. Allowing a 7 year old or a even a 15 year old (I agree – 16 might be the earliest something like this would even begin to be appropriate, if you had a mature 16 year old) to put himself out there in the social media world is risky. To do it just so your kid can get some free stuff he doesn’t even need is just wrong.

I don’t know the specifics of how this would work, but I can imagine that the more kids a kid is connected with socially would probably make him more attractive to the marketers who want him to stump their stuff. So now, kids are going to have an incentive to grow their social network and they will use less discretion when choosing who to connect with. The more strangers they are connected with online, the more danger there is for one of those strangers to want to do a kid harm.

My 7 and 10 year olds need my permission and a password that only my husband and I know to get to the g-mail account that we’ve set up so they can e-mail their grandparents. Allowing them on Facebook or Twitter or another social media site is out of the question.

I hope this marketing scheme fails because parents won’t stand for their children being put in this position, but sadly I have a feeling it won’t fail for that.