IMAGINE BEING The Kids. Really. Imagine being, say, 14 years old and having the internet all to yourself. There it is, in your very own bedroom, your very own special magic box that The Grown-Ups know next to nothing about.

It's permanently connecting you to everything in the universe you could possibly ever be interested in: pals, music, art, games, gossip, science, fashion, shops, making your own music, chatting people up, the most brutal bitching in the history of adolescence, globe-spanning jokes, infinite numbers of videos of everything imaginable (and some of them you made yourself), an Encyclopaedia of Everything. You can be reading and writing about everything on earth at exactly the same time as the other 1.3 billion internet users on earth, which is not only beyond cool but the actual definition of The Revolution.

Me, I would've loved it so much I would never have gone to school. If I was forced, with a large parental foot wedged into the backside, I would've ran round the block, ran back up the garden path, shinned up the bathroom drainpipe, broke into my own bedroom and disappeared under the covers, with the computer, until reversing the process come tea-time and then disappearing back upstairs again, forever.

This week's news, then, that 71% of 12 to 15-year-olds browse the internet "on their own" for 20 hours a week is only shocking in as much as it isn't 100% for seven hours a day. Or perhaps it already is, with kids lying about their internet addiction like we adults used to in the olden days as we swore to our doctors we "only smoke 10 a day".

This week's report from the Institute for Public Policy Research, Behind The Screen: The Hidden Life Of Youth (initiated by Gordon Brown, to be fully published in April), seems, on the surface, alarming: four out of five children aged five to 15 now have access to the internet at home, 40% of eight to 11-year-olds browse the web "on their own", and contact with internet pornography (through spam) is now experienced by 57% of net-using kids.

Furthermore, trumpet the findings, kids are now being "raised online", a phrase not only guaranteed to set the parental swing-o-meter to "Failure!", but one which encourages the idea of a monster in our very own homes.

It's as if the Big Bad Wolf has now spirited The Kids away, Up There, to Bogey Man Land, which their very own bedroom has become. However, from personal evidence (acquired from nosing around families), what most kids are actually doing Up There is nothing to do with porn, paedophiles, joining a religious cult, signing an anorexia pledge, buying drugs, starring in their own happy-slap videos, or making a terrorist bomb out of Cilit Bang and an egg whisk.

Nor is it anything to do with joining this week's public enemy number one website, Miss Bimbo - the virtual fashion game where nine to 16-year-old girls are encouraged to create "the coolest, richest and most famous bimbo in the world" via breast implants, diet pills and a billionaire boyfriend (an accurate reflection of everything they've already been bombarded with from the day they were born).

It is, however, everything to do with blethering a load of indecipherable piffle to someone exactly the same age as they are. Or, writing really horrible things on a gossip site's comments board about Kate Moss's boyfriend.

Or, tending to their MySpace, Bebo and Facebook sites like a window-box of their soul, in the name of trying to look cool/weird/clever/beautiful/talented, and pretending to be considerably more popular than they are, i.e. being fantastically self-absorbed kids.

Maybe it's time - instead of flagellating ourselves with fear and condemnation and ending up in a mass early grave before the age of 50 - to give The Kids a break and perhaps even trust them for seconds at a time.

Some of us, perhaps, should think back to our own childhoods spent inside our very own bedrooms, equally plugged-in to a terrifying outside world that was bewildering to our parents: The Radio.

Alright, John Peel wasn't pretending to be 14 and looking for our mobile phone number, but he commanded, nonetheless, our full attention. And this was for about four full days of the seven if you count listening - in complete isolation, with zero interaction of any kind, with anyone, for several years - to the tapes you made of the music he played the moment he wasn't on the radio.

Some of the rest of the time, meanwhile, from age 15 (if you saved up enough dinner money), was spent in a pub, illegally, with real-life boys who were several years older; some of whom you might wish existed only behind a screen (or indeed behind bars).

For the Net Generation, of course, there are still no "police" in cyberspace - a shape-shifting universe where kids lie about their ages, and "community guidelines" and "acceptable use policies" are feeble token gestures. But everything becomes more sophisticated in both good and bad ways. The Net Generation, defined and shaped by bedazzling possibilities still in the process of invention, could yet become the most smart, sophisticated, creative, globally connected and therefore globally empowered young generation the world has ever known.

Or, if they waste this opportunity writing witless drivel about Paris Hilton instead, youth will merely continue, in the great tradition, technology or not, to be wasted on the young.