MOMS & DADS TALK: Friending Your Kids on Facebook

Who are you friends with on Facebook?

Family, friends, coworkers, old school acquaintances make up the majority of my 250-plus friends in my Facebook account.  I love Facebook, and post a variety of pictures and regularly update my status with my witty adventures in parenting. But recently, both my father and my mother-in-law joined "the Facebook."

They have instant access to photos of the kids, and can keep up to date with what’s going on with us. But I frequently forget they are on there, until mid-conversation about something that happened and my mother-in-law will comment, “I know, I saw that on the Facebook.”

I admit that I’m fairly conservative with my status updates and photos. And knowing they are reading my posts makes me even more conscious about what I put out there.

I wonder if teenagers think twice about what they announce, if their parents are also on Facebook.

In today’s society of social networking, it seems that nothing is kept a secret. We announce personal things we would never share in normal conversation. We “check-in” when we get to a restaurant to let others know exactly where we are. And with smart phones, pictures and videos are shared within seconds of an event, not weeks later. Social media has defined us a society, where our life is more public than ever before.

So, how do you interact with family members on Facebook? Do you read your kids' pages and view their photos? Does social networking make you nervous about what you share?