All things Scrapbooking and More

More mum and dads are signing onto Facebook and receiving mixed reactions from their kids. Lori Aratani reports on this growing trend

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Photo: Reuters

WHEN Matt Florian signed onto his Facebook account recently to check the status of his 400-plus friends, he had a friend request. It was from his dad.

The junior at Sherwood High School, Montgomery County, Merryland, US, didn’t panic. He simply took a deep breath and pondered his options - “what are the social implications of ‘friending’ your folks?”

He could accept it or ignore it. If he accepted it, he had the option of limiting parts of his Facebook profile that his dad could see.

Facebook users around the world are contemplating similar questions when they log onto their accounts. More parents are signing onto Facebook to keep up with their offspring. Not only are they friending (or attempting to friend) their children, they’re also friending their children’s friends.

Some, like Matt, take the requests in their stride. He ultimately friended his dad. Others are less sanguine, voicing their dismay via online groups that decry parental intrusion and offer tips on how to screen them out. Even parenting experts are offering their own tips on Facebook etiquette.

When Facebook was launched by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, it was designed as a way for college students to connect with each other. Users created a personal page and were able to accept or send out electronic ‘friend’ requests for people to be included in their networks. People who were ‘friends’ were able to keep tabs on people in their network, send messages and even connect with friends of friends. It was like an exclusive club, since it was open only to those with certain email addresses.

But as Facebook’s popularity soared, its founders sought to expand its audience. In 2005, it allowed high school students to sign on. But it was the 2006 decision to open it up to the general public that drew howls from its original audience - and opened the door for the parental invasion.

In protest, several ‘abolish parent’ groups have sprung up on the site.

Yeamans and a few of his friends started “What Happens in College Stays in College: Keep Parents Off Facebook!” in 2007. They meant it partly as a joke but were stunned when more than 500 people signed on, each with a tale of parental intrusion.

Lily Goldberg, 17, a junior at Gaithersburg High School in Montgomery County, Md., said having parents on Facebook just seems weird.

“It’s like having them walk into my room,” she said.

Today, the fastest-growing segment of Facebook’s estimated 66 million users are people 25 and older. More than half of the site’s users are out of college. Whether that will have an impact on Facebook’s coolness remains to be seen.

For a generation accustomed to sharing everything online, it might seem odd that two more pairs of eye would raise such concern. But Steve Jones, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied digital culture extensively, said there’s a difference between the world and your parents. “What they want to keep most private is not something they wish to keep from strangers, it’s the things they want to keep from people that know them,” he said. “It’s ‘I don’t care what someone who doesn’t know me finds out. But I do care about what someone I know intimately (does).’ ”

Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University at Dominguez Hills and author of the book Me, MySpace, and I: Parenting the Net Generation said parents should be upfront about wanting to know what their children are doing online but shouldn’t be upset if their friend request is ignored. He recommended that parents and their children set up rules - not necessarily for the young people’s behaviour, but for mom and dad’s behaviour once they’re online.