by Kate Flaxx

Created on: November 21, 2010

I have to answer this question with ‘absolutely!’ and ‘why not?’

Facebook friend’s lists are usually made up of people that you know, so why not let your children add you as a friend or add your children. Being on your child’s friends list doesn’t mean that you need to go through their wall and scour their pages for things you can fly off the handle at later; parents don’t need to completely invade their child’s privacy, they can just use Facebook as a glimpse of how their child is getting along with people socially.

If the parent sees an issue, ti can be brought up in a tactful way like a conversation on internet safety or something along those lines.

Personally, I have a daughter whose 13 years of age, just old enough to have her own Facebook account.  I set it up for her and I adjusted her privacy settings and took off any information that I thought she didn’t need to add.  She has more friends than I do and gets requests for new friends often.  It was my daughter who added both me and my hubby (I think just for friend count) but that’s fine.

Now she’ll say ‘Ooooh, I got a friend request, wonder who it is’, this is an opportunity for me to just peek over her shoulder a little, see who it is and then ask ‘do you know that person?’  If she says they’re from school, that’s ok.  If the person is a 40 year old man she clearly doesn’t know, I ask her to just ignore and block.  This works well and she’ll usually ignore and block on her own now then tell me later that she has.

When something comes up on my wall with her name associated, I don’t ask her question after question, I let it go along with the rest of the stuff that comes up on the wall.  If it’s something like a silly quiz I don’t think she should be doing, I ask her to remove it and she does so, usually with a little protest.  If she adds information I think she shouldn’t add, I ask ‘do you really need to put that on Facebook’, she usually removes it when she thinks for a while and then might decide she doesn’t need it.  She asks questions about the items I post and that’s a good thing.  She also asks a lot of questions about comments other people make on my account which can be a little difficult to explain sometimes and depends on the comments.

I think there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being your child’s friend on Facebook.  My own daughter could remove me any time she likes and I’d still trust what she’s doing but at her age, I have to monitor her behaviour. I think that if a parent has concerns or worries, they can bring them up tactfully and turn the concern or worry into a really informative conversation. I have a feeling I wont always have access to my child’s account but at the moment she’s young and still learning about internet safety and people in general.  I don’t know that when she’s older, I’ll still have a place on her list, but for now she’s ok with that and so am I. 

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