How about a day pass?

A parent’s rebuttal

April 16, 2009

My teenage son “friended” me when I first got a Facebook account. That gave me almost full access to his online conversations with friends, the groups he joined, the photographs he shared — and commented on — with his wide circle of pals.

Big mistake.

While 90 percent of the things he posted were innocuous (I know all about his baseball and South Park fetishes, and I had already seen the goofy pictures of him and his pals in Israel), there was that other 10 percent.

Okay, he wasn’t committing felonies or exposing state secrets, but did he really want to use such language in a public setting? Would a college admissions officer find that nasty bumper sticker as witty as he did?

And let’s face it, in the online world, nothing is truly “private,” especially not something shared among 476 of your closest “friends.”

I cherish my kids’ privacy, I really do. Teens need space in which they can grow up, make mistakes, and establish their own identities separate from the parents hovering around them.

But when I was in high school, that separate space was smaller, safer, and less public. You could make a mistake, and, unless law enforcement was involved, the consequences stayed close to home. A dirty joke might have made its way around a locker room, and perhaps earned immortality on a bathroom stall. Gossip could spread like wildfire, with hurtful results, but rarely beyond the small communities of grade, school, or town. And when worse came to worse, there was always graduation.

Facebook turns what had once been the fairly cloistered world of teenagerdom into a mass medium — worse, one that stays archived and searchable, forever.

So the question for me isn’t whether parents and kids should be Facebook “friends.” They shouldn’t. Rather, can teens and parents agree on some basic guidelines so that the former don’t feel spied upon, and the latter don’t feel their children are doing something they may come to regret later?

So here’s my plan — I call it “open house.” Just as Queen Elizabeth periodically opens one of her castles to public tours, teens should invite their parents onto their Facebook pages for a brief look around. That will give anxious parents a chance to see what their kids are up to, and, one hopes, be reassured that it is nothing nefarious. And it is an opportunity for parents to offer some friendly advice on what they see.

That comment about your English teacher? Not a good idea.

And does a potential employer really need to see you in a bikini?

Parents don’t have to be your “friends” to love you. And it is out of love that they want to keep you from posting something obscene, abusive, or subject to misinterpretation on Facebook.

So let us look around. We won’t stay long.

Ploni Almoni was chosen as the pseudonym of a N.J.-based writer who doesn’t wish to embarrass his kids any more than he has to. He is not related to nor acquainted with Avi Cohen, although he admires his writing and was honored to have been given the opportunity to respond. He currently has 130 friends — none under the age of 30 — except for his son.