A few months ago a friend of mine was telling me how she had her teenage daughter go through her list of Facebook friends and delete a number of them. You might assume she had to delete teenagers who were perhaps questionable in their online behavior. No, that wasn’t it. She had to delete a number of adults.
You see, we attend a pretty large size church and there is a whole community of us that are Facebook friends with one another. In fact, the majority of my friends are from my church and that means I have both teenagers and adults as Facebook friends.
The reason my friend had her daughter delete some of the adults was because a number of them from our church had begun questioning my friend about things her daughter had posted. She got tired of trying to answer for her daughter and quite honestly, she was beginning to feel judged.
Now here is the thing with teenagers. They sometimes post some pretty stupid stuff. I’m just being honest here. My daughter has posted some pretty stupid stuff. Sometimes teenagers don’t really think.
Well I got a taste of what my friend experienced last week when a woman from church stopped me with this very concerned look on her face. She seemed apprehensive about whatever she was going to say to me. Finally she blurted out, “Do you see what your daughter posts on Facebook?”
I instantly knew which post she was talking about. My daughter had posted lines to a song that well, they were kind of depressing. It came across like she was trying to tell the world she was really hurting or something. At the time I had questioned my daughter about it. She didn’t really know what the big deal was, it was just some lines to a song.
So back to the woman who asked if I had seen what was on my daughter’s Facebook page. I told her that yes, I do see her posts and sometimes she posts somewhat strange things and when she does, I talk to her about it. She seemed to have a sense of relief and told me that she was just concerned. I did thank her for her concern but honestly, I had mixed feelings.
While I knew she genuinely cared enough to ask, I couldn’t help but think about the way Facebook can almost be like an intrusion. She wasn’t even friends with my daughter, her son was and she had been checking her son’s Facebook page and since he had commented on my daughter’s post she saw it. There are a lot of things you can learn about your children’s friends through Facebook.
At the same time, there are a lot of things others can learn about your children and you may not always like what they see. I continue to tell my daughter to think before she posts something but I would guess this will be an ongoing issue.
Do I like that other adults can see into my teenager’s life? I’m not so sure. I can see both sides of the coin, though.
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