As the editor responsible for assigning child rearing books, I must say I’m surprised it’s taken so long for a manual like Candice Kelsey’s Generation MySpace: Helping Your Teen Survive Online Adolescence (April, Marlowe & Co.) to rear its helpful head. Social networking sites have been around since the early 00’s, and MySpace.com—the leader by leaps and bounds with more than 100 million accounts—is definitely a force with which to be reckoned. Its multimedia capabilities require users to learn a set of technologies, and this is where I think adults got lost, and lost track of their kids in the process.

Kelsey, who cofounded a private high school in Santa Monica, CA, and acts as an evaluator for the College Board’s Advanced Placement program, seems to know her way around the site and more than that, as our resident teen expert Linda Beck points out in her starred review, Kelsey has investigated and witnessed the negative messages of online culture (among them, “privacy is not important”). And she shows parents “how to create a MySpace account safely and how to interpret what other bloggers are saying.”

For the full monty of Linda’s review, make sure to see the March 15th issue. See also her starred reviews of other recent teen-centered titles like American Academy of Pediatrics Caring for Your Teenager and Dianne Neumark-Sztainer’s I’m, Like, So Fat!: Helping Your Teen Make Healthy Choices About Eating and Exercise in a Weight-Obsessed World.