Read this.
Or don't. Basically it says that most teenagers are friends with their parents on Facebook. On top of this fact, it then follows that about 40% of parents required their children to friend them in order to have an account. And another group of parents made their children unfriend certain people.
I found this all very interesting as an example of the control parents exert of their children's lives. I recognize that there are different challenges to raising a child in the age of the internet. But I feel like it's been a long time since parents have known all of their children's friends. It's been quite a while since kids all played in the street together and everyone came over for fruit punch. That's not how things go.
On the same note, children in the past, as evidenced by things like the "Take Your Kids to the Park and Leave Them There" concept, had more freedom to do things on their own. They could wander and play in the park and whatever else with those communities of friends.
The same mother who I am not friends with on facebook also got called out by a neighbor for smoking in the park as a young teen.
In this I do see the recognition of small communities, of the neighborhood ethic that kept kids out of trouble, but there is also plenty of trouble my mother got into that wasn't witnessed and how different is that trouble from what kids today might get up to on the internet. Especially the youngest kids on facebook and similar sites - they've been brought up in an age where they know the potential dangers. This isn't a new, foreign technology. We are internet natives and we speak the language, know enough of the etiquette.
When my mother was planning to get a facebook, she called me first. I'd been on the site for about 2 years at that point, and she called and said to me, "I just want you to know that I'm getting a facebook and we're not going to be friends." This was her way of expressing trust, of saying that she didn't need to know everything I was doing on the internet. Yes, I was in colege by that point, but I was only 15 or 16 when I first joined the site and she had made no move to get on. And before that I was in one of the early waves of myspace users, the sketchiest of "networking" sites.
My mother actually draws strict lines between our mutual contacts. We share about 6 mutual friends, although there are certainly far more people that we have in common. One of our other major lines of separation is her brother. I'm friends with him. She's not. She knows it's a relationship I value and she has friended his wife instead. It keeps a layer of separation between she and I in the internet world.
As for making your children unfriend people, that was particularly interesting to me. How involved are you that you know enough about someone your child is facebook friends with, who apparently isn't their real life friend (because I assume they would be approved then), that you know they should unfriend them. On a day when I was actually home recently, a rare occasion, I got a friend request under an unfamiliar name. We had one mutual friend, a writer/performer I've known for a few years. This women was also a queer performance artist. I looked over her page, considered who our mutual friend was, even who some of the other names in her friends list were that I might know. I friended her. This is social networking for a reason. I don't know this woman, but she could be a potentially useful contact for me a young queer writer. I played through this process with my mother in the kitchen, debating it. She agreed with me. Yes, friend this unknown woman. Yes. She's never even met the mutual friend we share. But my mother has only really met about two dozen of my friends. This can't be a criteria.
When these kids are older, in college and what not, will the parents loosen their grip enough to let them unfriend each other?
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