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Watch Your Words on Facebook, Mom
As older people gravitate to sites like Facebook and Twitter, the inevitable happens — you have to decide whether to friend your mom. I’ve done it, most of my friends have done it, we kinda regret it, but after the whole “raised us for 18 years” thing, you kind of have to.
But you know how embarrassed you were when your mom would be all chatty and oversharing with your friends in high school? Imagine that, but 100 times worse, on a social networking site. This story details the feelings of some young adults — including rapper (??) Bow Wow who recently got in a massive Twitter fight with his mom. Not only did she publicly complain that he wasn’t spending enough time with her and bitch about him leaving his cars in the driveway, she did so with @replies that went to all of his friends. That includes a lot of celebrities, which means all their followers could see the posts as well.
Kids and teens tend to see social networking sites as their turf, according to the experts in this story. Parents who don’t respect their kids’ boundaries on such sites and speak to them the way they would privately at home embarrass their kids terribly and run the risk of alienating them. Parents need to imagine that they are in a room full of people when they are posting to their kid — which really, they kind of are — and behave accordingly. If they need to air a grievance or otherwise have it out without doing so face to face, they should do it via direct message.
Do you communicate with your kid via Facebook? If so, do you find it hard to set boundaries?
Image: Globe and Mail
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