What happens when the trappings of adulthood filter down to teenagers who, by definition, lack the fully developed brains that maturity affords, at least in theory?

You get kids who drink beer in secret and leave the evidence in plain sight; who drive too fast with the music too loud and too many friends crammed into the car; who, when the folks are away, throw parties where 25 invitees have each invited 25 others via text message; who snap pictures of themselves in various stages of undress and send them to their friends' cell phones, a practice known as "sexting."

Dumb, dumb, dumb. Not necessarily any dumber than what their parents did at that age, but in some cases potentially more harmful because of the uncontrollable nature of information in the digital age.

We are now more than a decade into the era of the actual "permanent record" that teachers in an earlier age invoked to scare uncooperative students. "Young man [or lady], this will go on your permanent record!" they would say. Except that permanent record was a piece of paper in a file drawer -- an isolated drop of water compared to today's interconnected oceans of bits and bytes that make it almost impossible to escape one's past.

That includes the past of one's own creation, with pictures posted, pasted and passed around on hand-held devices and Web pages whose shelf life may outlive us all.

Fifteen-year-olds aren't generally thinking very far into the future, when those pictures may well come back to haunt them in the form of college or job rejections. According to a raft of research on human brain development, that's partly because the grey cells that govern things like judgment, delayed gratification and actions-with-consequences are not fully formed.

This is why our legal system is supposed to treat juveniles differently than it treats adults. But by the time someone is old enough to become a prosecutor, we expect that person to show a higher level of rationality and common sense.

So it's disheartening to see how many district attorneys are trying to stop teens from "sexting" by charging them with child pornography.

This makes as much sense as charging a kid who brings a squirt gun to school with possession of an unlicensed firearm. But it seems that schools and law enforcement are so determined to save teens from themselves, they're willing to brand them for life in the process.

Pornographers are considered sex offenders. In many places they have to register under Megan's laws, which reveal where they reside and tell neighbors they're a danger to the community.

On Thursday, the mother of the little girl whose death inspired Megan's laws criticized prosecutors in New Jersey for lodging child porn charges against a 14-year-old who posted nude photos of herself on MySpace for her boyfriend, and everyone else, to see. Maureen Kanka, Megan's mom, said the teen needs help, not legal trouble. Amen to that.

Maybe Mrs. Kanka should call Wyoming County District Attorney George Skumanick Jr. He has threatened to file child porn charges against two girls in the Tunkhannock School District who took pictures of each other in their underwear and sent them to the phones of some friends. He similarly threatened another girl, who is shown in a transmitted picture coming out of the shower with a towel around her waist and breasts exposed.

The DA said he would drop the charges if the girls and the photo recipients agreed to probation and a 10-hour "re-education program." Enter the girls' parents, who have sued the prosecutor for retaliation and abuse of power, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which says Mr. Skumanick is overstepping his bounds and violating the kids' rights to free speech.

I understand the frustration of adults who see kids doing things like this with no comprehension of the possible outcomes. That New Jersey teen may have intended those nude photos for her boyfriend (disturbing in and of itself), but she didn't seem to grasp that once those images were out in cyberspace, there would be no controlling where they went.

This is where the debate over who's really to blame begins to rage. It's the kids' fault for being so stupid. It's the parents' fault for not raising them with decent values or knowing what their offspring are up to. It's the media's fault for producing an endless flood of sexual imagery selling everything from music to breath mints. It's the youth culture's fault for normalizing the public sharing of every private thought and act. It's the computer geniuses' fault for building an infinite network that has spawned a viral world of unintended consequences.

There may be some truth in all of these. But teens have been known to foil the best intentions of their parents, and the media techno-genies are out of the bottle and not about to go back in.

Surely there is a better way to impress upon kids the importance of exercising common sense than by threatening to make them pariahs for life. "Re-education" classes are probably a good idea, but not under the threat of prosecution, which tends to create a fair amount of resistance.

It's long past time for parents to teach their kids about the responsible use of technology from a young age, and for schools to institute mandatory courses on the subject. And when adults discover teens sending around racy pictures of themselves anyway, they ought to use all their brain cells before moving to criminalize it.

George W. Bush once said, "When I was young and stupid, I was young and stupid." Lucky for him, there were no cell phones to make a permanent record.