The secret life of kids online: What you need to know

A new report from the AAP clues parents into what their kids are really doing online. Good news: It's not all bad!

Facebook, Twitter, Shelfari, Moshi Monsters, Club Penguin, The SIMS -- the list of online games and social networking sites seems to grow longer every day. Also on the upswing: the alarming headlines about cyberbullying, sexting, and other forms of online harassment.

This ever-increasing presence of social media in kids' lives, often starting in the prepubescent years, has prompted the American Academy of Pediatrics to issue a clinical report to increase parental awareness of the sites their kids are visiting and how they work.

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"The digital world is an evolving landscape that parents have to learn to navigate," says Kathleen Clarke-Pearson, M.D., an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill and coauthor of the report.

Tweens in 2011 socialize more and more online, rather than at a friend's house or the mall, and even though Facebook and other sites have age limits -- technically no one under 13 is supposed to have a "page" -- 30% of parents admitted on Parenting.com that they allow their tweens to log on anyway.