I recently watched a Dateline NBC
segment retelling the tragic tale of two Florida teenage girls fighting over a boyfriend. The young man admittedly was dating the two girls for over a year and egged on their rivalry.
Family and friends were also aware of the two-timing Romeo and the growing rivalry but especially because things had gone public and gotten very heated on Facebook and Twitter, which is what peaked my interest in this story.
The 19-year old fled to a friend’s house when the other girl and a few friends found out where she was and drove by. Things took a terrible turn for the worse when girlfriend in the car tried to run the other one over. A knife entered the picture from walking girlfriend and soon girlfriend in the car lay dead in the street.For over a year the women would post pictures of themselves out on dates with Mr. Casanova and post it their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. The bragging soon turned bitter and threats began to be exchanged. Lots of nasty four letter words and tense conversations began to take place until one night the threats got so bad that one of the teens felt unsafe being home alone in her apartment.
Sounds like a modern-day Greek tragedy that could have been avoided if things hadn’t escalated for so long. One expert on the show talked about how social media, email and the Internet enable us to say things or speak to one another in a way that we wouldn’t if were face-to-face or using another mode of communication.
After watching this unfold with horror I thought where were the parents in all this? One of the girls was still in high school. Then I began looking into parental controls for Facebook and apparently their aren’t any.
I found lots of posts where parents were discussing this topic on Facebook and the solution was to have parental controls on your computer. But in this case we’re talking about women old enough to outsmart parental controls and too old for parental controls.
So what is a parent to do in a case like this? Communicate with your kids. Have your own account and try to check in on them.
As the parent of two very young little girls I am already dreading the teen years. Kids have so many more opportunities to stray or become prey to someone today then when I was growing up several years ago.
I felt that this particular case came down to self-esteem and had the instigation not gone back and forth for so long perhaps the outcome would have been different.
This story is clearly an extreme situation but in conducting research for this piece I read about a 10-yr old girl who had opened up multiple Facebook accounts for herself despite the fact that they have a minimum age requirement of 13 to open an account.
Kids are susceptible to over 500 million users people! Based on size that would be the third-largest country in the world! I just read these alarming stats onParental Software.
- There are over 50,000 sexual predators online at any time
- Around 1 in 5 kids has received a sexual solicitation
- 1 in 33 kids has been invited to meet someone, call them, send them mail, gifts or money
And one final word of caution, one day your child will be interviewing for a job. When that employer or recruiter Google’s them and over 87% do before even picking up the phone to call someone for an interview, your child’s Tweets and Facebook entries will be pretty high up in their Google results.
Please keep an eye on your child’s Internet surfing and social media habits.
Below are a fewresources for you. I haven’t tested or tried any of these but found them via a Google search.
