Community Corner
Parenting in Cyberspace: Making Friends, Or At Least Peace, With Your Child's Facebook Page
The Father's Forum session on Saturday provided an overview to help parents make informed choices about when, and how, their kids cross the Facebook frontier.
One definition of technology, according to the Rev. Maxwell Grant of the , is any device that was born after you were.
That bit of wisdom kicked off the Father’s Forum on parenting in cyberspace, held Saturday at .
For the next two hours, Sharon Charles, the Margaret’s Place counselor at , conducted a brisk tour of the perils and pitfalls of cell phones, texting, and social networking sites such as Facebook.
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“Kids don’t think of the consequences,” she told parents. “I tell them nothing is private.”
Whether it’s an intemperate e-mail or an embarrassing photo, it’s easy to forward potentially hurtful words or images, even if no harm is intended.
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And Facebook, by its nature, is a public forum. The older kids are before they’re allowed to have their own Facebook page, the better, Charles said.
But when? Based on development changes of the pre- and early-teen years that make kids better able to understand the consequences of their actions, seventh grade is good, but eighth grade is better, she said.
That may be a wildly optimistic goal, though.
Based on the informal polling Charles has done at school, she estimates that about one-third of 6th graders have a Facebook page. By seventh grade, it’s about half. By eighth grade, three-quarters or more have such pages.
“And many times, parents don’t know their kids have Facebook pages,” Charles said.
There’s no question that Facebook poses a risk, or at least a monitoring challenge. At the forum and in the last couple of days, I’ve heard tales from several parents of expletive-laden messages that their kids have received from friends, photos of underage drinking that have been posted and comments or status updates that may have been intended innocently but could easily be taken out of context.
It’s enough to make you want to pull your blanket over your head, which is what I would usually be doing early on a Saturday morning.
But Charles pointed out that technology has its positive sides: compared to the past, it’s far easier to stay in touch now with your kids because of cell phones and text messages, and the younger generation has better visual reasoning skills than their parents. It’s also far easier to look things up now because of the resources on the Internet.
If you decide to let your child have a Facebook page, it’s important to establish rules and guidelines in advance, Charles counseled.
Two absolutes: your child has to “friend” you on Facebook so you can see what he or she is posting, and you have to have your child’s password.
If you’re not comfortable with letting your child cross the Facebook frontier, trust your feelings, and learn to resist what some are calling “parent peer pressure,” the feeling that you have to let your child do something because everyone else is letting their kids do it.
That’s a feeling that our kids often promote, either consciously or because it reflects their own impressions. But it’s worth pushing back. “Everyone else” might turn out to be just one or two friends.
“When you hear the words ‘always,’ ‘everybody,’ ‘nobody,’ ‘never,’ you can probe that,” Charles said.
Another bit of wisdom from the forum: if you want your son or daughter not to stare at a computer or smartphone, put away your Blackberry—at least at dinner.
“So much of parenting is modeling,” Charles said. “If we want our kids to put their phones down, you have to do it, too.”