Buddy lists have become a new arena for competition and a symbol of social status. Those with the most names are considered the coolest. I asked my daughter how many names were on her Buddy List, expecting her to say four or five.

"I have the smallest Buddy List in my class," she said mournfully. "I only have 33 people."

To prove it, she went online and asked one of the more precocious kids in her class -- "She lives online," my daughter explained -- how many names she had on her list.

"Ninety-three," came the reply. "G2G. Bye." G2G means "got to go."

"See?" my daughter said triumphantly.

Kids pad their lists with all their classmates, their friends' friends, and everyone they know from summer camp. Zoe Zimet has 98, and Alison is maxed out at 97. "I had to take some off," she confides, having decided to jettison some of her younger sister's buddies, whom she'd used to pad her list when she first went online. "In the beginning, everybody had a lot of buddies and I didn't because I'd just gotten it," she explained.

In this sort of environment, leaving someone off your Buddy List is a stinging rebuke. "You're friends with somebody since the first day of nursery school, and they leave your name off purposely to hurt your feelings," says a mother whose daughter apparently suffered that fate. "There's all these cliques and formations in the classroom, and this is another tactic to put it to each other. It's mean, it's sadistic, and this stuff doesn't get talked about at parents' meetings because no parent will own up to their child being mean."

When I asked my daughter whether she or her friends ever indulged in such exclusionary behavior or spread malicious gossip about others, she denied it. However, her explanation for her moral rectitude provided small cause for comfort. "We don't like typing full sentences," she explained without evident irony.

I don't let them go on the Internet without me in the room -- the First Amendment is over ruled by parental privilege.

Daniel Smith, a handsome, soft-spoken sixth-grader at an Upper East Side private school, spends all evening, every evening, on his computer. "The second I finish my homework, I come online until I go to bed," he said as he sat before his screen while names popped on and off his Buddy List, signifying friends' coming online or leaving cyberspace, as swiftly as numbers on the nasdaq. "Homework doesn't take me that long, so that would be like five hours."

Daniel's mother denies that he spends that much time online. "It may be three hours," she said, acknowledging that even that is too much. "I'm not going to make a big deal of it until he goes to camp. After he goes through detox by being away, next year there will be hard-and-fast rules."

On a recent evening, Daniel and a classmate were discussing Rachel, Daniel's new girlfriend, who'd just signed off. "I hate her," the friend volunteered. "No you don't," Daniel typed back, sounding wounded, even in the affect-free dialogue of cyberspace.

The friend seemed to be jumping to conclusions. He'd never met Rachel -- in real life. But then again, neither has Daniel. If there's one thing for which cyberspace seems ideally suited, even among tweens, it is its ability to spark romance.

Daniel had made Rachel's acquaintance two weeks before while playing Sudika Sabre, a text-based Internet fantasy game created by a 15-year-old computer prodigy and friend of Daniel's that thoughtfully allows combatants to lower their weapons long enough to exchange pleasantries.

"We get along really well," Daniel explained earnestly, adding that he'd already told Rachel he loved her and that she'd reciprocated his feelings.

"It's easier to express yourself online," he added. "When you say it face-to-face, your stomach starts to grumble."

It's unlikely Daniel and Rachel will ever consummate their relationship, even with a kiss, since the 13-year-old lives in South Carolina. However, that doesn't appear to have dampened Daniel's ardor for a girl who describes herself as five feet six with green eyes and blonde hair and already appears to have mastered the art of wrapping young men around her little finger.

Daniel scrolled back to Rachel's conversation before she signed off.

"Don't tell her I said this," Rachel said, referring to a South Carolina girlfriend as if Daniel, sitting in his Greenwich Village apartment, might run into her in their school cafeteria, "but she's always trying to take someone away from me. Like when I was going out with this boy here she'd always talk to him and tell him she loved him and that she wanted to go with him."

Daniel has never seen Rachel's picture. "She hasn't got one online yet," he explained. Neither does he. His family bought him a scanner, but they haven't figured out how to install it.

Daniel's mother says her son chastised her when she innocently suggested they exchange pictures through the U.S. Postal Service: "He said, 'Mom, she's not going to give me her address.' "

Often, the first and only indication that his child has committed some sin online -- not of the flesh but a violation of AOL's code of conduct -- is when a parent attempts to go online himself and finds that his service has been suspended. "So you call a number and they tell you the reason," explains a mother whose daughter was a serial offender -- in the third grade. "She sent a bunch of e-mails -- like four or five hundred -- within a short period of time. I don't think she knew what she was doing, but it caught their attention."

This wasn't the family's first run-in with the AOL cops. "She did, at one point prior to this," the mother says, choosing her words carefully, "have a situation where she told somebody -- not to go fuck themselves, but she said something to somebody on the Internet, and we again got our service suspended."

AOL finds out not because it eavesdrops on children's conversations but because kids turn each other in. If love and romance is one side of the Buddy List, then retribution is the other. "You know, when we were young, if there were kids we didn't like, we drew terrible pictures," says Parry Aftab, author of The Parent's Guide to Protecting Your Children in Cyberspace. "The kids notify AOL all the time to turn in kids that they don't like. It's their new tool to get other kids back."

In one recent case, a sixth-grader received threatening e-mails on her home computer. "It said, 'I'm going to get you, I'm going to kidnap you, I'm going to torture you," says a parent who knows the family.