Social networking is my husband Jeff’s best friend. He feels like a super sleuth and as if he has a doorway into his sons private world. And with social networking, he does! It’s only this recent generation of children who’ve really grown up with this. We certainly didn’t have anything like Instant Messaging, texting, Facebook or Twitter. Heck, we didn’t even have internet! We all had to rely on old fashioned telephones, snail mail, actual conversations and smoke signals. OK, maybe not the smoke signals, but you get what I’m saying.

 

One of the hidden treasures of social networking is that parents can see what is going on their children’s lives, particularly teenagers. Teenagers converse and share and have their relationships out in the open on things like Facebook or Twitter. You know what they’re doing and who they’re doing it with, who they’re hanging out with. You know what they think about things. You know things they would never talk with you about. You see how they relate with other people. These teenagers are sharing their happy moments, their sad moments, what they’re angry about, everything. They’re an open book with social networking. There is no privacy for them any longer, by their own choice.

 

It’s like getting a font row seat view into your teenager’s brain and heart. This is incredibly valuable information. But you’ve got to be really careful with it as well. You don’t want them to know you’re spying on them. If they think you are, they’ll stop being themselves and you’ve lost a valuable resource of information. And before any parents get angry, I want to state that yes, it would be wonderful to have a completely honest and open relationship with your teenager, and we do. But teenagers will never tell parents absolutely everything that’s going on with them. And that’s just what happens when they are developing their own wings to fly with. And this just allows you to watch and guide from a distance while they begin to jump out of the nest.

 

So, you want to let them feel like you’re not watching or listening. What we’ve seen parents do is go to their teenagers Twitter streams to see what is going on with them. So when you see something that alarms you in a conversation stream, don’t immediately barge into their room and confront them. You want to see what’s actually going on, note it and then next time you’re taking them to school or sharing a meal, subtly introduce that topic. Keyword here is subtle, so they don’t block you or begin to hide things from their social networking. If every time they tweet that they’re upset, immediately afterward you ask them why they’re upset, then this isn’t going to work for you.

 

This has been extremely effective in our family to help guide our teen to make better choices and talk about why he’s feeling a certain way. It’s a really great tool for a parent. But remember, you don’t want to misuse the tool. You do want to continue to let your teenager feel they have their privacy and spread his or her wings. But you want to help and guide them. And there is never been a better time to know what’s going inside their minds because of social networking.

 

Teenagers used to sit there and stew and not have a place to vent things. Now they can go on Twitter and Facebook and they do it freely. So it’s great information for any parent to have, so you can guide your child to better ways of thinking and better ways of making decisions. If all is fair in love and war, then this type of parental fact-finding and espionage is definitely a tool worth using.