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I feel the need to share this experience with all parents who have pre-teens or teenagers.

Last summer my 16 year old son ran away from home. I called the police, all of his friends, even old acquaintances who I thought might know where he was. All of this to no avail, he just disappeared off the face of the earth.

Having a child run away is horrible as you don't know if they have been kidnapped (my son is 6 foot and 200 pounds so I doubted this but you never know), been hurt and is lying in a ditch somewhere waiting for your help, or joined some terrible group or gang that is going to destroy them before they even start to live. It's a terrible feeling and I hope parents NEVER have to go through it.

On the third day of his absence I was waiting by phone, anxiously waiting for it to ring. I decided to turn on the TV to distract my attention for a moment. There was a commercial on that quoted something from MySpace. I jumped off the couch! OH MY GOSH maybe there are friends on my sons MySpace I didn't contact! So I run into the computer room and look up my sons MySpace name. Low and behold he had checked his MySpace just 2 hours earlier (Luckily the makers of MySpace but a "Last Logged In" feature on everyone's profile). Now I'm relieved and angry. I know he is safe because he is near a computer (computer access = warmth and food) and now I am going to kill him because of what he has put me through!

My youngest walks through the door not minutes later and I tell him to give me his MySpace information because his brother has been checking his account. My youngest logs on and I email my oldest asking him where he is and to please call me. We get a message 2 hours later telling us to leave him alone and how mad he is at his brother for letting me use his MySpace account to contact him. Now I am REALLY angry!

I start surfing through his friends and looking at their pages to try and get a handle on where he is and who he recently contacted. What I found was VERY disturbing:

Photos of my sons friends doing drugs.

Photos of my sons friends with REAL guns up to their heads or positioned against other peoples heads.

Photos of these kids in sexually explicit positions or doing sexual acts.

Posts to each other about how they are going to "whack" this one or "mangle" that one all because of some rumor that was started.

And this is just the beginning. These are kids that have been in my home and I would have sworn they were the BEST kids on earth, very kind and very sweet, with fabulous parents! I sat there in shock! What do I do with this information? Can it in anyway help me find my son?

I sat on it for a day and pondered what to do. If I call the parents it could get back to my son that I "narked" on them and he would run even further away. If I didn't tell the parents these kids could get themselves killed with this reckless behavior. I opted to tell the parents.

Of course all hell broke loose. The parents were eternally grateful and the kids were very pissed! It did get back to my son and he called me (forgetting to hit *67 before he called) and I got the number where he was at. The police picked him an hour later.

Moral of this story is PARENTS KNOW YOUR CHILDS MYSPACE HANDLE and keep an eye on it. Surf through your child's friends and know who they are contacting and what they are doing. It could just save your child's life!

Learn more about this author, Kellee.
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