For kids, friendships that click

RACHEL Berkowitz made a new friend while attending an L.A.-area Elderhostel two years ago with her grandparents. The friend was someone 10-year-old Rachel very much wanted to stay in touch with; the fact that she lived in London with her family, and that the new friend lived in Mar Vista, was a nonissue.

The girls exchanged e-mail addresses and corresponded so often that when Rachel returned for a visit last year, the two were as comfortable as if they’d been in each other’s company all along. Meanwhile, Rachel expressed interest in knowing other American girls, so her friend “introduced” her by e-mail to someone from her school. Soon, they too were corresponding -- friends without ever having met.

There was a time when advice on getting ahead introduced the novel notion of “networking” -- pursuing success by building on and taking advantage of one’s personal connections. Today, the thought that anyone might need such instruction seems so 20th century. If a typical 11-year-old heard such advice presented as innovative strategy, he or she would collapse laughing.

Kids may not be climbing career ladders, but they are already adept at making social contacts, sharing them, manipulating and using them.

Two converging factors are responsible. Kids inhabit a larger and more varied everyday world than their parents did. Youngsters’ social circles used to be small: family, maybe extended family, friends who lived nearby (who also were school friends), perhaps a few other acquaintances from Scouting, synagogue or church. Now, and especially here in L.A., kids have buddies from multiple neighborhoods in public or private schools that draw from across the city, involvement in religious school, after-school day-care programs, summer camps and sports.

Then there’s the Internet. According to a June report from the National Center for Education Statistics, 80% of high school students, 70% of those in middle school, half of those in the elementary grades, and even 23% of kids in preschool go online.

By middle school, the majority are experienced with e-mail. They’re slavish devotees of the Instant Message: A 2001 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that a typical IM session was 30 minutes and involved three or more friends talking simultaneously.

Now kids’ ability to reach out to those they’ve just met, hold onto those they know, and bring disparate parts of their lives together with the touch of a key has changed the boundaries and definition of social life. Online, kids and teens still act their age, whether warm, silly and spontaneous or bratty and viciously cruel. But they do so in a much more public way.

“In the past, a kid might have wanted to introduce a friend from home to a friend from camp, but the barriers, like taking time to write a letter or risking a phone call to a stranger, were too high,” says Michael Thompson, a Massachusetts psychologist specializing in children and families and coauthor of “Best Friends/Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children.”

“The ability to ‘meet’ in cyberspace in a very low-risk way, and the simple ease of it has given kids a real confidence in their networking ability.”

What may be most stunning to adults who still remember the pre-computer era is that these skills don’t seem to be learned -- they just appear one day, instinctively, and fully formed. Kids share Internet lingo and information with each other, and years of playing computer games make them utterly comfortable at the keyboard.

The most basic kid networking, the friend-to-friend introduction, takes place constantly: Two girls, newly graduated from different elementary schools and about to start different middle schools, discover that each knows someone who’ll be in the other’s class, and immediately turn on the computer and start making introductions.

A seventh-grader hands the new kid in school a dozen IM screen names, and within a week, she’s “talking” to all her new classmates, even the ones she’s too timid to approach in person.

Last year, Maddie Cane, 12, of Santa Monica met a neighbor’s friend and liked her “so I asked for her e-mail address and screen name. We started writing, just talking about random things.”

Cane also uses the computer to keep in touch with a friend from preschool who now lives in Massachusetts, and has e-mail-introduced her neighbor -- “my best friend at home” -- to her best friend from school, who lives in Malibu. The two girls write, but have never been face-to-face.

Friendship spreads internationally. “I took my niece, age 16, with me on a working trip to Japan, and she met three kids,” says Thompson. “She shot some photos of them, and to reinitiate a relationship, all she had to do was send the digital photos to them over the Internet. But she went further. She posted the photos on her website, wrote about the kids, and in that way introduced her acquaintances in Japan to her circle in Chicago.”

Even love comes by computer: Teri Wolfe of Sherman Oaks says that her teenage daughter met her first boyfriend several years ago when a mutual friend set them up by giving each the other’s e-mail address. “Before they ever went out, they knew each other from talking online,” she says.

Kids also use websites such as MySpace, Friendster and Facebook to socialize with old friends and make new ones. (Although the sites require users and posters to be over 16, there is no mechanism to check ages.)

The middle and high school sets usually stick to those they already know. “It would be considered kind of shady to just meet some random person,” says a recent high school graduate who lives on the Westside.

Come college, though, the sites are a way to pre-meet a new crowd. Weeks before the graduate left for Harvard this fall, she and her future roommates had found each other and “were e-mailing every day. We figured out who was going to bring the TV, and which movies. We already knew each other.”

Others use the websites to bring friends from the past back into the fold. Sara Goldman, 19, of Laguna Beach had always wondered about the girlfriend she’d lost track of when she changed high schools five years ago.

In Chicago, during her first year of college, she says, “I looked her up on Facebook. Her picture and profile popped up; I sent her a message and she wrote me this really long letter. It’s cool that we’re keeping in touch again.”

Some kids expand their social circles through multiplayer gaming, Web-based games played in groups with others who live anywhere from the other side of town to the other side of the planet.

Bill Nail of Mission Viejo says his older son, Jay, 15, “is constantly on the phone conferencing with at least two friends from other neighborhoods, each of whom is playing the same computer game while they’re talking. I’ll go by the room and hear, ‘Eddy, behind you!’

“As it’s gone on, I’ve noticed that he and these kids, who don’t go to school together, will make complex arrangements to meet,” Nail says. “Their time playing the games together online produced some solid ‘regular’ friendships.”

And preteens frequently use the information available about those in their networks to social advantage.

One mother watched her 12-year-old daughter research her new soccer team, a group of girls drawn from much more affluent neighborhoods than hers, using the team roster, MapQuest and real estate websites that told her what home in their neighborhoods cost.

The same girl used the website MySpace to see what school friends had been up to over the summer so she could talk to them about it when school began.

Having that information made her daughter more socially confident, she says.

There’s no question that kid-networking can have a downside. Accumulating hundreds of screen names and addresses and spending afternoons communicating with their owners leads to bigger virtual communities, but psychologist Thompson fears “it also contributes to the loss of actual neighborhoods. Why deal with your neighbors, whom you don’t ‘love,’ when you can e-mail a close friend?”

An 18-year-old girl tells the story of a friend who changed her image when she changed schools in eighth grade. Using e-mail, she contacted new schoolmates and got old ones to e-mail them with glowing remarks about her. By the time school began, she had taken on the “cool” persona she’d always wanted.

Sherri Rapaport, a Brentwood mother of four, worries because “online friendship doesn’t involve much personal interaction, which means the kids don’t learn how to relate to each other eye to eye. It’s easier to hide behind the Internet. To exaggerate. To lie.”

And Internet socializing can and too often has turned ugly. In an extreme case several years ago, an eighth-grade girl in the Washington, D.C., area was targeted on a Web bulletin board by a schoolmate who used obscenity-laced put-downs and eventually urged her to kill herself.

Some websites that focus on school-based gossip, scandal and slander have been closed down, but plenty still exist.

On one, a recent posting by an L.A. high school student is littered with expletives and uses the real name of the person being targeted.

But a clear majority of the kids who responded to the Pew survey insisted that Internet use “helped” their relationships with their friends. As many parents agreed that use was largely positive.

“It takes the old concept of pen pals to new levels,” says Deborah Rozansky, mother of Rachel Berkowitz, who notes that her daughter sometimes “is online with friends -- and friends of friends -- who live in Australia, Europe and America, all at the same time.”

And “what a boon for the shy and awkward,” says Thompson. “It allows them a way into the conversation.”

That point may be moot: All agree that kids to the modem born will never give up their networks.

“It’s changed the social scene completely,” says Rapaport. She sounds almost wistful. “The phone doesn’t ring so much anymore.”