When I was 13, my mom read my diary. To this day I will never forget the enormous feelings of betrayal, embarrassment and anger I felt over that gross invasion of privacy. I promised myself I wouldn’t ever do that to my children.
Fast forward 20 years (or so) and here I sit, mother to a 16 and a 13 year old. I am logged on to the latter’s Facebook page and the F word is staring me in the face. The epithet is in a status posted by one of my daughter’s “friends”, a sweet-faced 7th grade girl who uses the word not simply for emphasis but in its (more horrifying) verb form. To make matters worse, several 6th and 7th grade peers “like” the comment.
To date, I have been easy on my children when it comes to monitoring their online conversations with friends — I don’t want to invade their privacy too much as would my own unjust mother … but maybe I need to be a little bit like Mom, after all she was just worried about me. I’ve also warned my young ones many times that anything online is fair game. “If you put something on the Internet, in any form, you’d better be OK with your grandmother reading it, you hear me?!”
I read last summer about a free Facebook application called gogostat that allows you to monitor your child’s Facebook activity. At the time I thought I wasn’t interested, but things can change once you start snooping and glimpse a few month’s worth of teenage status updates (they start to keep you up at night). Lori Getz, author of the MomLogic blog tells us exactly how to use it and why it’s OK. (You have to let your children know you are setting it up, which forces you to talk to them about it and why you are doing it, and the app. allows you to only monitor for specified content and not all conversations).
My mom read my diary because she wanted a peek into my life during those troublesome teenage years when I refused to let her in. Now I get it. In a way, I hate opening the Facebook floodgates, but it does allow me a mode of interacting with (and admittedly a little bit of spying on) my family that didn’t exist when I was growing up.