Thaindian News

Aug 30 (THAINDIAN NEWS) Social networking has become “the craze” for people of all generations, with users as young as elementary school, or as old as those in their eighties and nineties. The majority of the world’s population now has accounts on either Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, or one of many others, and many even have profiles on two or more of these networking sites.

A great deal of those users are teenagers, who use the Internet as a form of recreation. Often, these kids have their parents ask to “friend” them on sites such as Facebook. For some, this can be a very good way to re-connect between parents and teens, during those years which it is difficult to find anything in common. For others, whose parents seem to use the networking sites to “spy” and “nag” it can become a humiliating nightmare.

When a recent study was released which suggested that teens who have parents as their friends on Facebook will be embarrassed and “uncool”, kids everywhere began to consider “unfriending” their parents. The kids are more likely to avoid being friends with their mothers than with their fathers.

A survey which was conducted recently shows that at least a third of Facebook teens are ready to take their parents off of their friend’s list. Jeanne Leitenburg, a 27 year old who created a Facebook site which is against parents joining the networking site stated that they gt up to 20 complaints a day from teens who claim that their parents are interfering with their life through Facebook.

There have been several suggestions made lately that other relationships are not healthy on Facebook as well, such as allowing your boss to be a friend, and such. Many people find these studies to be ludicrous and feel that whether or not someone should be friends on a social networking site should be based on the relationship they have with the person, not a study which tells them it is “not cool”.

If your parent is nagging and nosy, then they will most likely be that way on Facebook, and if your boss is hard and intruding, then perhaps they should not be in your list of “friends”, but if those relationships are healthy in life, then social networking can be an extension of that relationship, according to some.

Perhaps, for parents of teens, it is walking the same high-wire that you do in life, and knowing when to be nosy and when to butt out. For teens, Facebook has made it simple to “hide” anything posted from anyone you choose. Each and everytime a person posts something into the “What’s on your mind?” box, they have the option of clicking the padlock icon and customizing the posting to choose who can, and cannot see it. An easy solution for those who do not wish for their parents to see everything they post, but would like to keep them as “friends”.