Steinberg

"As advocates of children's rights, we believe that children should have a voice about what information is shared about them if possible," says Stacey Steinberg, a legal skills professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law in Gainesville.

"The presence of peers makes adolescents and youth,but not adults, more likely to take risks," Steinberg and Gardner concluded.

"What our study suggests is that teenagers learn more quickly and more effectively when their peers are present than when they're on their own,'' Steinberg says.

But Steinberg suspected this tendency could also have its advantages.

In a 2005 study, psychologist Laurence Steinberg of Temple University and his co-author, psychologist Margo Gardner, then at Temple, divided 6 people into three age groups: young adolescents, with a mean age of 14; older adolescents, with a mean age of 19

In a 2011 study, Steinberg and his colleagues turned to functional MRI to investigate how the presence of peers affects the activity in the adolescent brain.

In his latest experiment, published online in August, Steinberg and his colleagues used a computerized version of a card game called the Iowa Gambling Task to investigate how the presence of peers affects the way young people gather and apply information.

Steinberg and Bahareh Keith, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Florida College of Medicine, say most children will likely never experience problems related to what their parents share, but a tension still exists between parents' ri

Steinberg and Gardner randomly assigned some participants to play alone or with two same-age peers looking on.

Steinberg pointed out that parental sharing on social media helps build communities, connect spread-out families, provide support and raise awareness around important social issues for which parents might be their children's only voice.

There's been little research on the topic, Steinberg wrote in a law article about this issue.

"We're in no way trying to silence parents' voices, " Steinberg says.

While states could pass laws related to sharing information about children online, Steinberg feels parents themselves are generally best suited to make these decisions for their families.

Yet in the years following the publication of this study, Steinberg began to believe that this interpretation did not capture the whole picture.