“My mom reads my wall every single morning,” says a teenager from London. “She knows what guy said what to who, and how I feel about it, and whether or not I went out last weekend, what I was wearing, what I was drinking – EVERYTHING! She looks at who sends me gifts, goes through not my albums, but my friends’ friends’ albums to see pictures I’m not tagged in. Forget the limited profile option, she knows her way around it!”
But surely all parents can’t be undercover stalkers?
“I don’t go to their profile page until some new pictures are uploaded,” a mom in India tells me. “I love to look at their class trip pictures a lot. I have full confidence in them and so don’t need to check on them.”
But she admits this is because both her daughters live at home.
“Since my children are at home I don’t need to communicate with them on FB, but it will be a very handy way to keep in touch with them when they will be away. :)”
She inserted the smiley face herself (all correspondence for this article was done through FB as an attempt to use the medium I was writing about).
“I am on FB because my kids live in the US and this was the easiest way to see the pictures my daughter had posted before I had a Blackberry,” says another mom from India. “Also it’s the easiest way to communicate with my son as he is signed in all the time.
“I don’t very much read their chats as the language is different from the kind I use and it gives me shivers! haha…
“It’s their life and by keeping tabs on FB it’s not like you will be able to stop your kids from doing any wrong. It’s only FB, not something you can physically touch.”
Good point.
Another youngster’s dad has a ‘no family’ policy for FB. “He only adds friends or people with a different last name.”
So it’s not just kids who want to keep their lives private. Maybe parents want a privacy mode for their profiles too.
One mom explains that using FB makes parents feel a little more with the times.
“Face Book, as my aged friends say, helps them to catch up with their school friends, and I see a lot many reunion parties happening. Secondly I think it’s also ‘cool’ to be on FB for them. It makes them feel young!”
As every FB user knows, it’s a virtual space too complicated and controversial to make generalizations about its users—whether parent or child.
For now, let’s just keep ‘poking’ each other and see how it goes.
