Sure. But it doesn’t automatically follow that keeping track of all their online activities is the way to do so.
I’ll probably be enabling logging on the firewall in a few more years. If I start seeing weird traffic, we’ll talk about it. If they can satisfy me that what they’re doing is benign, sure. If not, they can show me what they’re doing. If not, they can give me passwords and I’ll look at it. If not, I can begin traffic analysis on the intranet and get their passwords. They’ll know all these steps are available before they get their computer accounts.
I’ll probably teach them the same things, and how to protect their communications against such attacks, as they seem capable of understanding the issues involved.
Logging on to their account as the first step of monitoring (and we don’t even know if this is the first step) seems invasive, but the mom may not have the savvy (or the available time) for less invasive forms of monitoring to be effective.
My 15-year-old step-daughter uses her Myspace page to hook up with friends, arrange dates, arrange meet-ups to get high, brag about her latest time getting high, etc.
She has stolen her mother’s prescriptions, stolen her grandfather’s truck, & she ran away from home for months.
She currently lives with her grandmother since her grandmother will enable her to continue to live her way and her mother and I will not.
We’ve discussed what the rules will be if she were to move back into our house. One rule is that there is no, none, nada privacy expectations. No privacy online, no privacy in her bedroom. The rule is that we can search her purse, room, computer files, whatever at any time we wish.
There’s lots of other rules that will be implemented but the rule above all, the rule that rules them all, is “It will not happen in my house!”.
I can’t control her when she goes out - but it (drugs/sex/alcohol/etc) will not be in the house.
Myspace, facebook, YIM, AIM and all those sites will be simply blocked at my computer. We did fine without these, they’ll (my step-daughter & my younger kids) be fine without them, too.
An earlier poster said that the ability to have privacy is earned. I, obviously, endorse that view.
Depends on what “fooling” entails, but if any harm came to the kids, then yes.
And also, what makes this mom so goddamn smart? Does she necessarily have some creep-radar that her daughter is lacking? Or does she watch Oprah and therefore thinks she’s educated about internet communication? Wisdom does not necessarily come with age… just look at the people who keep the 419 scams afloat.
I am an autonomous adult and even though my parents don’t care what friends I have any more, I still have to be careful about posting personal information online (even on my Facebook page). I am the only one with my password but I certainly don’t expect privacy when I use it, so I don’t put sensitive information there. I know that if I post something that someone (anyone!) shouldn’t see, and yet they see it anyway, then it’s my problem and not theirs. Why should it be different for kids?
I have seen lives messed up and careers destroyed by poorly considered e-mail messages (and Facebook status messages). NOTHING you put online can truly be considered “private.” This is the world we live in.
Children need to learn this, and they need to learn to manage their own privacy. I see nothing wrong with the situation in the OP - if I was that kid, I would learn ways to communicate with my friends without my parents able to track it. Just as now I have ways to communicate with folks I need to, without putting myself and my privacy at risk. For instance, I don’t use my work e-mail for things that I wouldn’t want my employer to know about.
I was a teenager before the internet became a big part of life, but even as a university student I used the computer in my family’s living room and had no expectation of privacy. Just like everyone else, I learned to quickly switch screens when someone walked into the room, and find other mechanisms by which to share information I wished to remain private (skills which I have found useful in my career).
(Re “why doesn’t she just get her own account and be her Friend?” - a lot of what goes on on Facebook can be totally invisible to your friends. You can set your account so that your activities (messages, events, group memberships, etc) don’t show up on your page or in anybody’s news feed, and you can set it so that you yourself don’t appear in anybody’s Friends list or searches.)
My children surfed the internet knowing that I could review their internet activities at any time, review their online profiles at any time, and retrieve stored chat logs at any time. Any attempt to alter or delete the files would result in immediate revocation of internet privileges. Unfortunately for both of them, I was much more computer adept than they were.
Did I look often…hell no. I have better things to do with my time. I’d check social networking pages and other stuff maybe quarterly, unless they had done something wrong, which would increase the frequency of my checks. When her friend and volleyball teammate was putting her personal information online, I alerted the friend’s parent (as volleyball coach, I had known the girl and the parents for years). The parents were very grateful. They had told the girl not to do it, but does every young teen listen to parental advice, or do most think they know better?
As for helping with the college application and scholarship process - I wish my parents had been more involved. But there is a difference between helping and doing it for them.
It depends on the situation, the child, and their past. In this OP we’re hearing a tiny snippet of the situation.
When I was 12 there was a 17 year old HS student who rode the bus with me. We talked a lot. It started out really innocent, but soon he was wanting to hang out with me. He’d write notes and I’d save them because I was a swoony 12 year old girl.
I left a note in my pocket and my mother was doing laundry. She found it. There were hearts all over it so she was curious and read it. I told her who it was from. She knew him (via my older brother) and knew he was a junior in HS while I was in junior high. I was told I couldn’t talk to him anymore. I still did. She contacted the bus driver (a neighbor) who was to keep us apart. She did, but we still wrote notes. He lived across the street from a friend of mine and when I visited her one day we went to his house. I had one hell of a time fighting him off me and I knew then why my Mom was so concerned although I’d never admit it to her.
Kids think they know tons when they know very little. Hell, adults get messed up when it comes to dealing with one another. Kids have little life experience and not much common sense. I was a smart kid. Honor roll, straight As, never in any real trouble. It doesn’t take much to fool a teenage girl. That’s why they’re good targets for victimization. It goes on more than you think.
Who knows this teenager’s background? Certainly not anyone here, including me. All I know is she’s most likely 16 or under and her mother wants to try to have a little bit of control over what her daughter does online. Apparently the child wanted a FaceBook, her mother said she could with certain rules. A little lesson in responsibility, privileges and rules.
I have no idea if the mom is “so goddamn smart” or not. Of course adults have judgement issues. We all do. Teenagers have less life experience to assist them with their issues. Plus, the girl is a sophomore in high scholl (16 or under most likely) so her mother is responsible for her. Setting limits with kids is part of what makes a parent responsible.
Wisdom does not necessarily come with age, that’s true. It also doesn’t usually come with youth.
Please reread your second sentence above. Bravo for you that you didn’t meet a total stranger in an alleyway (who said anything about an alleyway? you can get assaulted or kidnapped in a sunny place to yaknow?) I dare say this mother knows more about her daughter than you do. I’m sure there’s more to it than what the OP knows through no fault of their own. It’s a family thing, who are you to say she’s wrong because it wasn’t that way with YOU? Like you said, it depends on the kid.
I view “cyberspace” as just another place - where you can get into trouble or have a lot of fun (sometimes both at once!), where you can create real relationships with people - the good, the bad and the ugly. I reserve the right to pop my head into my son’s bedroom when he’s got friends over - that way, he can have the door closed, which is nicer for both of us, but I know that he knows he’d better remain civil and in an upright position. I reserve the right to open his tent door when we’re camping and there are other people in his tent. I reserve the right to walk by him if he’s hanging out with his friends in the mall. I reserve the right to go over to his friend’s house when he’s spending the night away to make sure they’re not out after curfew. I hardly ever do any of those things, but I’d rather be straight with him that I’m reserving that right, so we have no shattered trust issues if and when I do decide to play private eye. The internet is just one of many spaces he knows isn’t ever really private. Not only can I check in on him at any time, so can (and will) his future schools, employers*, business partners, friends and romantic interests.
I checked on him a lot when he was little. As time goes on, I don’t have to do that so much. It’s not about “cutting the cord” as if that’s a one time event, it’s about gradually loosening restrictions as the kid proves capable of handling more freedom.
One of my favorite books on parenting points out that you don’t have to have a whole lot of freedom to be happy, but you do need to have more than you had in the past. Increasing freedom gradually keeps kids happy without throwing them to the sharks in one fell swoop.
GorillaMan, I know you’re caught up on this “right to privacy” of the friends, thing, but still I say, “Screw 'em.” My kid is more important than their illusion of privacy - and that’s all they have on-line, the *illusion *of privacy. That’s all they have with written correspondence, too, for that matter. Forget hackers - people forget to log off on public computers, people leave email windows open when they walk away for a minute, people check emails and social sites in public libraries or airports - even if no one is actively trying to pry, that stuff isn’t secret.
*My mom is a teacher, and the first thing she does when she finds out she’s getting a new student teacher is ask me to look up their Facebook/MySpace/Tribe presence. It’s the only reason I have a Facebook, actually, so I can run checks for her. I’m sure she’s not the only professional judging people on their online presence.
Given that by default you can’t see anything much about somebody on Facebook until you’ve acknowledged each other as friends, how do you go about doing this?
It is an option to set up a Facebook account this way, but AFAIK it is not the default. I think the default is “Networks and Friends” able to see your profile, with networks being schools, employers, and metropolitan areas. It is definitely possible to see many non-friend profiles.
I don’t usually find as much on Facebook, to be sure. Still, the main profile pic alone can be quite…illuminating, if you’re about to become a student teacher of a sixth grade class. At least one woman was turned down by the principal because her Facebook picture was of the not-enough-clothing-and-too-much-alcohol variety. I don’t know if that’s the reason he gave her, mind, but plans were going along swimmingly until they found that. I figured if it was easy enough for me to find just searching her name, it was more than easy enough for horny 12 year old boys to find.
You don’t need “anything much” for it to be too much for a socially conservative middle school.
OK, that would make sense. I presume that it’s because I’m not a part of any network that the only options available to me for visibility of profile are ‘friends’ and ‘friends of friends’.
I forgot to make this other point earlier:
I wonder, if I was to access the web-based email of participants in this thread, how many would accept my defence for doing so, that they only have an ‘illusion of privacy’ anyway, and therefore I wasn’t doing anything unreasonable? My earlier comments along these lines haven’t been about what’s theoretically possible, but what constitutes reasonable behaviour.
That certainly makes sense.
I am not a minor and you are not my parent. That is an entirely different question.
ETA - That could make for an interesting thread if you want to start one.
I must dwell under a rock. This is the first time I’ve ever heard the term “helicopter parenting” - does it mean to hover?
Pretty much.
Nor was I talking about the children of the parent involved, but their friends.
I was planning on dropping the topic (but I’m always hopeless at doing so!) - feel free to start one yourself, I’ll contribute if I’ve got something interesting to say. 
Not only, as **Antinor01 **says, are you not my parent, but you are not the parent of a minor I’m communicating with. When I communicate with children (now as an adult and back then when I was a kid) I always do so under the assumption that their parents may find out what I tell them.
Except the parent even in this case isn’t going into the friends email. They are (possibly) reading their own child’s email. The sender isn’t relevent. Now if the parent were finding out who the friends were, what their email was and then hacking into that email…I would completely agree that lines were being crossed. That is not the situation though.
I’m not that invested in it to start a thread, just thought it could be interesting to follow.