The new cool – Facebook parents
Back when I was nearing the end of my high school years; what isn’t surrounded in a fog anyway, the big psychological pabulum of the day was that the really cool parents where those that acted like their kids were their very best friends. This went over well with the kids because the worst punishment your best friend would give you for doing something wrong was a time-out. Sure there was that really icky feeling in the pit of your stomach when your real friends dropped by and saw your parents behaving like idiotic teenagers while trying to be friends of your friends.
Fast forward to today and we suddenly find ourselves in our parent’s shoes only now we have a whole new set of boundaries that we are having to figure out. We have become the social network parenting generation and where once we might have cringed at how our cool parents acting like post adolescents our children cringe as they see friend notifications on Facebook from us, their parents. Even worse we are lead to believe that if our children ignore us on these social networks then we are doing something wrong; or even worse our children are doing something wrong.
Linda M Furrier in a post on Furrier.org suggested that this is a new parenting frontier for us as parents.
My take: This is a new parenting frontier – an opportunity. We are two steps behind our kids, even if we think we know what they are doing online. It is a parent’s responsibility to discipline (Latin root = teach) our children how to protect themselves. Many kids balk at the idea of sharing their online communications with parents. Until my children are 18, I am the authority. We need to set expectations for our kids walk them through this uncharted territory with guidelines. Parents: require your children to share passwords with you. Set time aside to see what your children are doing online. Invite them to browse through their accounts with you. Ask questions and really listen.
Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins in his post about this wrote
The drum that’s usually beat here is that education is key – if you educate your children about the dangers online, they’ll learn to avoid them. Certainly that’s important, but just as important is adult and parent education. Parents need to learn what tools and sites their kids are using, and how to regulate and monitor them as well.
While both Linda and Mark make some excellent points they both seem to be forgetting Rule #1 of Childhood – kids lie and they will always lie when they are doing something they know they shouldn’t be doing. It is no different when it comes to the Internet and social networks. Just as the last thing any boy of my generation wanted was for his parent to find out he knew where Dad’s stash of Playboy and Penthouse was, the kids of both genders today don’t want their parent to know what they are doing on Facebook. Even more important they don’t want to know what their parents are doing on there either. Their reaction to that is probably no different than not wanting to know what is going on behind their parent’s bedroom door. Neither of those things are cool as far as your kids are concerned.
As Mark noted also in his post there is the usual over-protectiveness that comes with the territory of being a parent but try as you might there is nothing that you can do to change Rule #2 of Childhood – that being that there is no concept of a future where what they do today will come back to bite them on the ass. Just as girls in the past use to sneak out with a change of clothing that could get them grounded girls today see MySpace and Facebook as just another place to wear that change of clothing and hot new lipstick.
We’ve all read the stories of famous people who later in life become haunted when photos show up of them being less that proper. Well in this day and age kids don’t care where pictures of their improper behaviour show up even if that behaviour is illegal in the eyes of the law; because for the most part their morals are not the one’s we grew up with and tried in turn to teach to them. I agree that parents do need to have control over what their children are doing on the Internet because it can be a big dangerous place. I don’t agree though that we need to get all warm and fuzzy with them about it.
I agree that parents do need to take more control of what their children are doing online but remember these are the same kids that we willingly handed over things like cell phones to before they reached puberty. If we expect to be able to know what is going on in their online time; whether it be something as simple as texting 1,000’s of messages a month through to posting questionable pictures on Facebook, well .. good luck with that plan.
