Are you writing on your son’s wall? Poking your daughter’s best friend? Sending your college roommate a bumper sticker?
Everyone seems to be on Facebook these days. It’s one of the primary ways teens communicate with one another. If you haven’t explored this social networking site, you should consider joining the 70 million others who use this remarkable tool for connectedness and communication.
Facebook is a free website where users are given their own page to post information, news, pictures and videos about themselves. When they become someone’s Facebook “friend,” that person can see their page and communicate with them. Parents need to understand this corner of our cyber world. One of the best things we can do for our kids is to understand their social media, and then teach them how to handle it.
First, you will have to decide whether to friend your child. Children less than 13 years old are not permitted access to Facebook. If s/he does not have a Facebook account yet, you can consider making this privilege contingent upon knowing the password to his/her account. This will allow you to review it periodically to make sure your child isn’t posting or seeing inappropriate posts. Of course, tech savvy kids can set their privacy settings so that you can’t see all the photos and messages they post.
If your child already has a Facebook account and/or you’re opposed to friending him/her, you should still join Facebook to learn how it works. Ask him/her to help you set up your Facebook account; this is a great opportunity to talk to about friending strangers, posting photos s/he doesn’t want college admissions folks or future employers to see, and using inappropriate language on his/her virtual walls. Remind him/her that what is posted online stays online – forever. Your child has the ability to make his/her profile visible to only those s/he knows and trusts, therefore mitigating the concern about predators communicating with your child through Facebook. Ask to review your child’s privacy settings.
Ask to look at your child’s profile page and review the content. The first thing you’ll see is the “Wall.” You should also click on the tabs for “Info” and “Photos” and “See All” in the Friends box to see who is linked to your kids.
Fully understanding both the benefits and dangers of social networking will go a long way in keeping your child safe in cyberspace. To stay one step ahead of him/her, you need to understand how to add friends, applications, groups, photos, etc. to your own Facebook page so that you know how it all works.
