Ways to monitor your child’s Facebook activities

Ways to monitor your child’s Facebook activities
One way to monitor your child’s Facebook activities, as we mentioned above,
is to “friend” them and get them to friend you – then you can establish a
family rule that says something like, “No one can block other family members
from content any of us posts in Facebook.” For parents’ part – if you and your
kids do become Facebook friends – resist the temptation to make public
comments on their pages. Family members can always send each other
messages, which are private like email messages.
Some kids might be willing to have their parents friend them but are
embarrassed to have their parents’ names show up on their friends list. Some
parents solve this by creating an account under a different name, although it
is a violation of Facebook’s terms of service not to use your real name.
Another approach some parents take is to require that they know all their
children’s passwords (email, instant messaging, social networking, etc.). We
suggest this works better with younger children, because many teens would
rather “go underground” (use other sites secretly) than allow parents that
level of monitoring capability. The level of privacy a child has depends so
much on the child and on a family’s own policies and values.
It can also be helpful to type your child’s name, address and phone number
into a Web search engine such as Google or Bing to see if anything is being
said about him or her on the Internet.
Another option is to subscribe to one of the new online reputation-monitoring
services such as SafetyWeb or SocialShield, which can help you find out what
your teen is posting online without your having to friend them in Facebook.
These services charge a monthly fee.