What to do? Daughter is involved in an online relationship

In My Humble Opinion
61

I had the exact same experience as Sierra Indigo (minus the being grown up at 16 part) and have the same advice. (woah!)

Don’t assume the person on the other end is not who they say they are. I’ve been talking to and meeting up with people I met online for 15 years now and not ONE of them has not been who they said they were. If your daughter is fairly smart she can tell the difference between a neat boy and a creepy perv.

She did break the rules tho, so that’s up to you to deal with. Deal with it the same way as if she’d broken the rules by doing something else, like running up a cell bill. Don’t freak out because it was teh scary internets - the Internet is just a part of life anymore.

I happen to currently be dating the boy who was my 14-year-old online boyfriend. We met in person when his parents brought him to my house to meet my parents and then take us to the amusement park. We ended up not liking eachother for some reason after meeting in person and didn’t hook up again until 13 years later when the Internet made it possible to reconnect to old “BBS buddies.”

He IS actually a creepy perv, but he’s MY creepy perv :wink:

62

I don’t really have any advice to add here, as it seems you’ve had enough to sort out already. All I want to say is, does your daughter understand that anything she gives her friends, even the close ones, in probably in danger of becoming public? Once she has given them her email address she has no more control of it, and kids often don’t even think twice about giving other people that kind of info for others. As in, “Oh, I have a friend you’d like” or “So-and-so sent me this, let me give you her address.” And that doesn’t even include the times they just send a blanket email or a forward to every single blessed person they know. I’m sure she knows she broke your rules, since they were pretty clear, but she might not quite understand just how much information she’s putting out there. Doesn’t have a lot of bearing on this directly, but she needs to see it.

We told our daughter not to put personal information on her myspace page, and she didn’t, for the most part, not her full name, or her address, or that kind of thing. But she did include her school, and her interests included some extracurriculars. It took me about 30 seconds to figure out who she was and where to find her, and I’m not that much of an expert on the 'net.

63

[QUOTE=thirdwarning]
We told our daughter not to put personal information on her myspace page, and she didn’t, for the most part, not her full name, or her address, or that kind of thing. But she did include her school, and her interests included some extracurriculars. It took me about 30 seconds to figure out who she was and where to find her, and I’m not that much of an expert on the 'net.
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This is what I don’t understand. What does “knowing her school” or “knowing her name” buy a creep? If your daughter is into sports her name has probably appeared in the weekly suburban rag, maybe even her picture. As I said before, your name and phone number and address are all accessible through the phone book (and online phone directories like anywho).

So how does knowing “Janie is an 8th grader at West Joshua Tree Middle School in a city two states away” make her a target of a predator? Wouldn’t a real predator be more interested in the kid right in front of him in his hometown?

I remember a few years ago that a “predator” tried to kidnap his underage online girlfriend from the mall. But when all the facts came out it turned out the “predator” was all of 18 (the girl was 16) and the girl planned to run away from home. There would have been no kidnapping. But she blabbed this plan to her BFF, who told the police, who scared off the “predator” and got her some counseling.

Reagardless of what Law and Order SVU teaches us, online predators are really rare.

64

[QUOTE=PunditLisa]
You seem to think that as long as they aren’t touching, I shouldn’t be worried. And I find that to be simplistic. What really concerns me more than anything is that she has gotten very close to a person whom I’ve never met. If he lived in town and were dating, or even if she became BFFs with a girl she met at school, we could meet him/her, meet the parents, look him/her in the eye. We don’t know him from Adam AND she’s kept him a secret from me. If it’s all kosher, why hide it? That’s what bothers me.
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Other than the violating-your-rules angle (I’m not dismissing that; I’ve just got nothing to add), I think this is the angle to approach the conversation from: what your standards and expectations are when she starts spending a lot of her time with anyone, be it romantic or friendship, IRL or in cyberspace.

You’re in a position to tell her that those expectations are fundamentally the same in both environments - that you’ll get a chance to know who her friends are as she spends more time with them, get a chance to meet (or at least talk with on the telephone) the parents of the ones she spends a lot of time with, and all that. You don’t expect to hear every word from every conversation that she has with each of her friends, but that, as her mother, you are keeping tabs on her life at this level. You’re not watching her every move, but you are patrolling the borders.

And that, as you can tell her, is what you expect to be able to do here. Only a bit more so, because you don’t have the ability to place her online relationships in the context that you have for her RL relationships. You’re starting from zero with her online life. If you’d moved across the country to a strange town, and she were in a new high school that you had no clue as to whether it was good or bad, you didn’t know anything about the neighborhoods or the cliques, you’d be paying a LOT more attention to what was going on in her life, until you built up a picture of her world. Same thing here.

And here, there’s the additional complication that people online might not be who she thinks they are, and as a mother, it’s your duty to keep an eye out for this possibility. I agree with everyone who’s said that the vast majority of people you meet on the Interwebs are pretty much who they say they are, but even if there’s only a 1/1000 chance that the boy turns out to be an adult predator, it’s unquestionably your job as a parent to guard against this possibility, and there’s no reason not to tell your daughter that.

Finally, there’s plenty of ways that RL relationships can go awry in harmful ways, that their happening IRL at least provides ways to see the risks coming, and provides checks of various sorts that are absent in cyberspace. For instance, if she was dating IRL some charming young man who turned out to be controlling and/or abusive, her RL friends would sense the change, and be a likely reality check for her, even if they probably wouldn’t say anything to you unless they were genuinely worried for her physical safety. But who’s going to play that role in cyberspace? She’s very much on her own there. Nothing’s happening in the context of a web of trusted relationships, a community.

She may well have a community of friends online, but it’s just not quite the same. And IMHO, you should tell her that she should expect that your scrutiny of her online life would be a bit tighter than of her real-world life, because it IS different from RL, and a lot of the normal checks are gone. You can’t ‘patrol the borders’ the same way as you do IRL, so you may just plain have to seem a bit more prying to keep the same sort of eye on her.

65

Thanks for all the good advice.

The necklace is, indeed, real. It looks like a pewter rose pendant on a cheap chain. I asked her a few weeks ago where she got it and she said her friend, Lauren, had given it to her.

My husband and I talked it over and here’s how we’re going to approach it. Since our younger daughter is at a sleepover, it’ll be a good time to talk to her in private.

a) We’re going to tell her what we discovered her IMs and that they have given us reason to be concerned. It’s obvious that she’s become friends with someone that she met on the internet and it puzzles us why she hasn’t ever brought him up to us given his importance in her life. We are her parents and want to know who her friends are, whether they are IRL or online.

b) We’re going to communicate our main concern, which is that she’s met a stranger and is baring her soul to him that though there’s no way of verifying that he is who he is. He could truly be a 14 year kid, or he could be a 50 year old man. Or he could be a 12 year old kid pretending to be a 14 year old kid. No matter what he is, she needs to cool it with the sex talk as 14 is too young for that kind of thing.

c) We’re going to bring up the necklace and express our unhappiness that she’s violated our rules and that there will be a punishment for that:

Punishment will be that she will have her laptop taken away for non-school work for 3 days.

She’ll have to abandon her yahoo mail account which includes her real name. I didn’t like it before and should have made her create another one without her name when I discovered it.

And, finally, that if we catch her in another lie, she can expect a more severe punishment. There’s nothing wrong with having friendships, even romances. There IS a problem with lying to her parents. We don’t lie to her and we don’t want her to lie to us.

Oh, and if any of this interferes with her school work or if we feel that she’s ignoring her IRL friends for the sake of her online friend, then we’ll consider limiting the time she can spend on the internet.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

66

[QUOTE=An Gadaí]
I’ve used the Internet since I was about 14 years old and one thing I’ve found is that the vast majority of people are who they say they are. I can’t think of one instance of import where someone said they were whatever age/locale/inclination and it was a lie. I’ve met tonnes of people in real life that I first made contact with online.
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Our experiences differ dramatically. While I have met some wonderful folks IRL who started off as internet buddies, I’ve also known several “impostors” during the last few years. On one of the wedding/parenting boards I belong to, one woman was exposed as a fraud after several years of membership - the entire life she’d written about online was a product of her imagination, and she’d kept the charade up the whole time without anyone suspecting. Another fell on hard times and faked a stroke to get attention and money from other members. A third had an abortion and after the wrath of the Mommies came down on her head, she announced she was quitting and snuck back under a different name several months later.

Even the Yahoo chat room that my father hangs out in had it’s own little sensation a couple of years ago: a couple who met there and fell in love were about to meet for the first time in real life when tragedy struck and he was killed in an accident. Devastated at first, she received a sweet message of condolence from his father that contained a pet name that made her suspicious because she didn’t think he would have told his father that. She made some phone calls and discovered he’d faked the whole thing.

It’s not commonplace, but it’s not as rare as you’d think either. There are people out there with the time and dedication to manufacture whole lives for their own personal amusement or gain.

67

Good luck! I think you’re really wise to expect and enforce truthfulness. I think the way you’re paying attention is excellent parenting - kids need our help.

68

PunditLisa, that sounds like an excellent plan. 3 days without the laptop is not too harsh, but enough that she’ll feel it. And, maybe, enough that she’ll feel bored enough to call up some of her IRL friends and want to hang out in the meantime…

I feel like, at this point in the thread, it’s a perfect example of how a GOOD message board advice thread works. It seems to me like you came in here in a bit of a panic, and through talking it out with other people, now have a more realistic view of what transgressions are really worrisome, and which ones need support more than punishment.

I’ve learned quite a bit from our younger Dopers, the ones who have grown up with online relationships, and that’s going to affect how I handle my son’s internet usage as well. They were/are able to provide a perspective that none of my IRL friends can give me.

You got the freak-out out of your system here, where it won’t damage your relationship with your daughter, and now you have the knowledge and emotional stability to make and implement an excellent plan with your husband. Let us know how it goes.

This is how a message board SHOULD work, IMHO - to better our relationships with people we know and love.

69

[QUOTE=WhyNot]

As for Romeo, I’d not forbid contacting him on other computers. For one, it’s just simply not enforceable. And, as I’m sure you know, the only thing that makes young love even more exciting is forbidding it. In fact, I’d ask about him. Be interested, not in a judgmental punishing way, but as interested in him as if she knew him IRL. Find out his name, his hobbies, his successes and failures. I might go so far as to say, “Well, I sure hope he’s who he says he is and not some 45 year old guy with a potbelly posting from his mother’s basement!” Nothing will whither the vine of their love faster than Mom’s approval at that age.
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Completely agree. I MIGHT go as far as to help arrange him to come visit - always supervised of course and not until late next summer which will give her plenty of time to meet someone new and wonder how she is going to deal with the “out of town boyfriend she has never met who is supposed to visit her next summer.” And if he does come to visit, the harsh light of reality of Romeo is actually sort of a loser (which is at least somewhat likely) in real life may force a “break up” within weeks of his leaving. And if he is an adult, an invitation to visit his “fiancee’s” parents may scare him off. And if he does come visit - that will involve phone calls with his parents and actually meeting him.

15+ is the perfect age for “I have met my true love and we MUST be together forever.” You will likely have a few of these before the more mature stage of relationships falls into place.

70

I have a story. This happened a couple of years ago to a friend of the family’s 14 year old daughter. She developed an online relationship with a man in a nearby state. Due to some tattling by the girl’s best friend, the mother found out they were planning on meeting (he was going to drive five hours to her) and the girl was forbidden to meet the man, who represented his age in his early 20s. The girl was grounded for violating internet usage rules and all was thought to be well.

Fast forward to a few weeks later, the girls asks to be driven to the mall and dropped off, she’s going to meet a girlfriend there. Mother’s spidey sense tingles and mother follows daughter into mall, where she meets a strange older man. Mother follows man and daughter out of mall. Mother calls police on her cell phone and continues to follow the couple. Police arrest man as couple is entering nearby park. Man is the same internet whack job who is really 40ish and has condoms and a digital camera on him.

Now, this girl has other issues going on and is currently in a facility for troubled teens half a country away but the story is true and you should do whatever you can to find out who this “kid” is.

And for the love of god, what parent kicks out their 14 year old child? Something is fishy and rotten.

71

[QUOTE=Dangerosa]
And if he does come to visit, the harsh light of reality of Romeo is actually sort of a loser (which is at least somewhat likely)
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I think we’ve progressed past the days when the only people who socialize online are geeks and losers with no life in meatspace. Nowadays, teenagers judge each other as much by their MySpace/Facebook as by their hair and clothes. He may very well be a regular kid; he doesn’t have to be the Comic Book Guy.

[QUOTE=SailedTheOceanBlue]
And for the love of god, what parent kicks out their 14 year old child? Something is fishy and rotten.
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Has it been confirmed that they threw him out of their house? Perhaps they banned him from the net, or from Gaia, for a few days, and he expressed it as “kicked out.”

Also, as far as her spending less time with her IRL friends, I read that as, she likes a guy, and she’d rather hang out with him than with her giggling girlfriends. Nothing new about that except the venue.

72

[QUOTE=Rilchiam]

Has it been confirmed that they threw him out of their house? Perhaps they banned him from the net, or from Gaia, for a few days, and he expressed it as “kicked out.”

[/QUOTE]

I thought something similar - maybe he was exaggerating a bit or even making it up for sympathy.

73

You’ve gotten some excellent advice here, and I think your solution is a reasonable one. I wanted to comment on this:

I love my mom dearly, but as a teenager, I would have sooner have had hot needles shoved under my fingernails than to talk about my love life with her. Of course you have a right to know who your daughter goes out with, but I don’t blame her for not confiding about an on-line relationship. It’s a strange line. As a parent, you have a right to know where and with whom your teenager hangs out, but you don’t have a right to know about their feelings. I think that couching it as a friendship rather than a romance is a good one.

74

[QUOTE=Rilchiam]
I think we’ve progressed past the days when the only people who socialize online are geeks and losers with no life in meatspace. Nowadays, teenagers judge each other as much by their MySpace/Facebook as by their hair and clothes. He may very well be a regular kid; he doesn’t have to be the Comic Book Guy.

[/QUOTE]

Naturally, but at 14 most guys are kind of losers in some fashion or another. And this one is, afterall, 14 and has an internet girlfriend as opposed to one whose boobies he can actually touch. Assuming all is on the up and up.

75

[QUOTE=Elysian]
These people are being too nice to you, in my opinion. If I was your daughter, I would expect as a human being on this planet to at least have a modicum of privacy, and you violating my privacy would infuriate and betray me. If I was your daughter and you came to me, waving a printout of my IM conversations, I would first scream at you and then walk out the door and spend a week at my friend’s. Perhaps your daughter is more reasonable, I don’t know.

However, this boy (if he is a boy, and I’m leaning toward “definitely”) can’t even touch her, and isn’t even talking to her on the phone. A lot of teenagers at the age of 15 are very sexually active (that goes for pretty much all of my friends at that age). If all your daughter is doing is talking online, and not even cybering with him, you should hug her instead of confronting her and consider yourself lucky.

And as for keystroke logging, what a crappy thing to do to anyone.

Stop snooping in your daughter’s things. You should know that when you snoop you almost invariably find something to get upset about, no matter how baseless it is. Learn your lesson from this and don’t repeat it.
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I’m guessing you do not have children yourself?

76

[QUOTE=SnakesCatLady]
I thought something similar - maybe he was exaggerating a bit or even making it up for sympathy.
[/QUOTE]

Not out of the realm of possibility at all. My niece was caught online telling tales when she was 14 or 15. Among them: that her mother and grandmother (my mother) hit her all the time, that they lock her in her room, and that she has been kicked out of the house for days at a time. None of those things are true. Certainly no one has beaten her, or kicked her out of the house. And, she couldn’t be locked in her room - she had no door on her bedroom. Why? Because she destroyed it by slamming it and punching her fist through it. She had to make do with a curtain for awhile.

She was telling all this to another young girl in another part of the country. She was getting a thrill from all the attention it got her.

77

[QUOTE=SailedTheOceanBlue]
I have a story. This happened a couple of years ago to a friend of the family’s 14 year old daughter. She developed an online relationship with a man in a nearby state. Due to some tattling by the girl’s best friend, the mother found out they were planning on meeting (he was going to drive five hours to her) and the girl was forbidden to meet the man, who represented his age in his early 20s. The girl was grounded for violating internet usage rules and all was thought to be well.

Fast forward to a few weeks later, the girls asks to be driven to the mall and dropped off, she’s going to meet a girlfriend there. Mother’s spidey sense tingles and mother follows daughter into mall, where she meets a strange older man. Mother follows man and daughter out of mall. Mother calls police on her cell phone and continues to follow the couple. Police arrest man as couple is entering nearby park. Man is the same internet whack job who is really 40ish and has condoms and a digital camera on him.
[/QUOTE]

This story sounds a little weird to me. If the mother really thought her daughter was up to something, why just follow her? And why continue to follow her when she sees the guy instead of confronting her–I’m pretty sure one of my parents would have done something like that. It just sounds a little ULish to me, is all.

78

[QUOTE=Elysian]
These people are being too nice to you, in my opinion. If I was your daughter, I would expect as a human being on this planet to at least have a modicum of privacy, and you violating my privacy would infuriate and betray me…

Stop snooping in your daughter’s things. You should know that when you snoop you almost invariably find something to get upset about, no matter how baseless it is. Learn your lesson from this and don’t repeat it.
[/QUOTE]

Your expectations are unrealistic. Until you are 18, your parents are legally responsible for you and thus you have no expectation of privacy. If your parents know you are doing something potentially dangerous or illegal, they have a moral and legal obligation to intervene.

79

[QUOTE=Zoggie]
This story sounds a little weird to me. If the mother really thought her daughter was up to something, why just follow her? And why continue to follow her when she sees the guy instead of confronting her–I’m pretty sure one of my parents would have done something like that. It just sounds a little ULish to me, is all.
[/QUOTE]

After some searching, I found a news item from it. It looks like I was told some incorrect details, he was from IN state (rather than out of state), they didn’t go into the mall as they met outside of it and he had pills along with the condoms and camera.

Considering I heard the story via <—my mother<—girl’s aunt<—girl’s mother, I’d say it was astoundingly accurate. :rolleyes:

Here’s the link.

80

I know I’m posting late, but I experienced this from the daughter’s angle in high school. I knew my parents were completely ignorant about the Internet, and I exploited it. I also met someone online in an art chatroom. I disclosed my full name and he knew my state, but I never gave out my address or phone number. We never declared love for one another, but he apparently grew fond of me.

One morning, my family was woken up early with a phone call. It was the guy’s stepfather. He said his stepson ran away from home the night before to run away with me. This was all news to me. My parents were furious and I had to have a police presence at school that day. It really took a long time for my parents to regain their trust in me and I had to look and feel like a complete idiot for much longer.

They found the kid eventually trying to hitchhike to my home, and he was little bit beyond typical teen angsty. No idea what happened to him after that. Scared me straight though.