This was something that came up this week. My 12 year old daughter has wanted a myspace account since she was 10. She is really computer savvy and mostly follows the rules that are set about computer use.
I travel for work, so most issues about household decisions usually happen over the phone. So my wife calls me this week, day before yesterday saying she wants to let my 12 year old kid have a myspace account because a lot of her so called friends have one.
She insists that she is going to enforce the rules and only allow her to do things that are within her control and keep an eye on it and make sure she is monitored. Trust me when I say it does not work, like a lot of you know because you cannot see what they are doing 24/7. So I argue with her that it is not just the integrity and behavior of my daughter she has to control but all of the friends that she going to link up with. She called BS on it and insists that it will be just fine. So I reluctantly agree.
She calls me today to tell me that as soon as she opened the account and let some of her friends link back to her, a whole bunch of BS started spreading. One girl propositioned another boy about one of the linked friends giving a BJ. Next thing you know it escalated and became a storm. Some of her friends were over and were talking about it and my wife happened to overhear the conversation. Now my daughter is asking her mother what a BJ is ? Suddenly my wife does not want my daughter to have a myspace account anymore. She wants access to the website stopped all together. I am laughing my ass off, because I had warned her on it. Luckily we have a Mac which has Parental controls that allows us to prevent my daughter from going to inappropriate websites. But the panic in my wife's voice was golden for me and made my day until the question my daughter asked took the color from my face.
You know a lesson from all this is it does not matter how well behaved our children are, a lot of the things they do are dictated by the behavior of their peers. You can only help your child to do the right thing, not their friends. So be careful and think about it before you let your innocent children get into a mess like this.
God ! I just hope my daughter does not ask me what a BJ is, I would just die.