This article examines the impact of telecommunication's vanguard technologies on families and youth in Trinidad and Tobago. First, it provides a brief overview of globalization and its impact on Caribbean countries, generally, and specifically, Trinidad and Tobago. It then examines telecommunications as a global enterprise. The third section briefly describes U.S. media technologies and youth commercialism, followed by a description of the influences of these technologies on youth and their families in Trinidad and Tobago. The next section documents the responses of parents and other professionals in supporting youth. Last, implications for research and advocacy are discussed for Trinidad and Tobago, and for other similar Caribbean and developing countries. In the past decades, many changes have ushered in the lives of individuals, families, and communities nationally and globally. One area of major change is that of advanced technologies where computers and other telecommunications brought instant access to vast pools of information and changes in the ways that information is transmitted and used. In fact, telecommunications emerge as one of the most powerful media industry sets in the national and global community with many interrelated communication categories such as: (a) domestic long distance and local services; (b) international communications facilities and services; (c) mobile voice and data services; (d) satellite and satellite mobile communications; (e) Internet and multimedia network services; (f) public data transmission services; and (g) circuits and networks (Seel, 1997; Wartella & Jennings, 2001). Today this media industry continues to expand whereby providing the platforms and possibilities to accommodate vanguard technologies including computer games, the Internet and Music Television (MTV), CNN, ESPN. With digitization, any media content, whether educational or entertaining, the potential to reach global audiences. Tom Freston, President of MTV Network, stressed the importance of MTVs international expansion emphasizing that the network has established itself as an icon for young people everywhere (cited in Gillen, 1997, p. 50). It was evident that MTV would play a major role in developing, packaging, and delivering messages and images about culture, worldviews, beliefs, and values. The media technologies are not only mirrors of these messages and images; they also create, manipulate, and disseminate them. Further, telecommunication services enable the global economies to map the entire world as its market, linking people globally and whetting their appetites for information and material wants and needs-creating consumers of multiple and ever-changing products (Wartella & Jennings, 2001). With this global connectivity and information immediacy, telecommunications presents a challenge to traditional roles and responsibilities of parents. Most of the programming sold abroad is entertainment where youth and their families watch television and receive vivid pictures and messages about American life. Through all this programming, commercial advertisements present a dizzying array of products and services, replete with celebrities and other commercial messages, to transnational audiences. Children of all ages are exposed to these commercial messages in their homes, schools, and other socialization contexts (Bickham, Wright, & Huston, 2001; Crawford-Brown, 1999; John, 1999). For parents, in particular, the primary challenge is associated with how to provide support for children to process information, make decisions, and develop cross-cultural competencies-all in the context of wrestling powerful forces bent on globalizing popular and commercial culture (Walsh, Laczniak, & Carlson, 1999; Walters, 1999). There is a small body of literature, and a dearth of research, on the impact of telecommunication and its concomitant commercial influences on children in developing countries. …