If ever you are on Facebook you would notice that this is one site that is enjoyed by all age groups. No wonder it is the most popular social networking site with more than 500 million users. Increasingly many teenagers are addicted to Facebook and this is a great concern to parents. However many have not liked it when they found a “friend request” from their parents on their Facebook profiles.
According to a recent Nielsen and AOL research, three quarters of parents questions said they were friends with their children on Facebook. However a third of that count admitted that they were worried about not being completely aware of what their kids were up to on the web.
It was also found in the research that almost 30 percent of the teens interviewed said that if they had the choice, they would “unfriend” their parents from their profiles. They said that parents would let them have the accounts only if they “friend” them which made them an easy target to more questions and their profiles were often spied on by parents. The research found 41 percent of families forced their kids to “friend” their parents.
The research said that parents fear that teens might end up “living on facebook” by making it part of everything they do. Regina Lewis, a consumer adviser with AOL said, “It is part of the modern-day parenting reality as now parents have to monitor what kids were up to”. She also said that some parents go as far as sharing passwords of their kid’s Facebook accounts.
The research found that teenagers tend to have higher friend numbers, much higher than the average of 130 on Facebook. For some children to “friend” a parent is not always an option. Nielsen and AOL research questioned 1,024 parents and 500 children aged between 13 and 17. More than half the kids admitted of not personally knowing all of their friends on their Facebook profiles while 41 percent of parents said that they knew less than half of their kids’ friends personally. About twenty percent of parents admitted to have told their children to “unfriend” someone.
As simple as it seems, the “to-friend” issue is actually taken pretty seriously because it involves the child thriving for more freedom while parents’ concern for their safety. The research suggested that it is always good for parents to keep a close eye on their child’s Internet activity.