Comments

• Eva Francis, Ravenswood 07/12/08

  I have 4 children (16, 14, and two 12 year olds). The oldest one does MySpace with his friends, and I just discovered that my 14 year old does MySpace also. My two youngest daughters want to try, but I have been successful in delaying this, for now. I really like www.imsafer.com it monitors my children's conversations with others without my intrusion. It does not give me access to their site, nor does it reveal all of the conversation. It simply monitors conversations for key words like sex, age, name, home, etc. Check it out. Without it I would not have discovered my son's MySpace site!

• Maureen Gray, Spokane, WA 07/11/08

  I have access to my teens MySpace page and I thought I could keep tabs on everything that he was doing on the page. One day, in the middle of a fight about curfew, he informed me that he had a Facebook page, too, but I would never find it because he doesn't use his real name. I tried all of the nicknames I knew for him and couldn't find him in Facebook. No matter how vigilant you are, if a kid wants to hide things from you, they can, more easily than I thought.

• Larry Rosen, oceanside, CA 07/07/08

  There is nothing inherently wrong with allowing your teens to live a bit of their lives in cyberspace. When many of us (I have four children from 17-32) grew up, we had social gathering places such as malls or friends' houses, or simply hanging out in the street. Many of today's teens don't have those luxuries. Being on MySpace or FaceBook IS their social life. You can't take it away from them but you can be a proactive parent and establish limits and boundaries so that everyone wins. Please check out my new book, Me, MySpace, and I: Parenting the Net Generation, for information that I have gathered from years of research with parents and teens plus 30+ years of teaching child development and parenting programs. If you have any questions, email me at LROSEN@CSUDH.EDU or visit my website at http://www.Me-MySpace-and-I.com. I welcome your thoughts and comments.
  
  Dr. Larry Rosen

• Mary Osborne 07/05/08

  I don’t allow my children on MySpace and they are fine with that. I don’t think they actually know any teens who have these pages. In our house, the computer lives in the kitchen and each of my 3 teens are allowed an hour on it per night to do homework. They are given “bonus” time for surfing as a reward for doing extra chores. We have parental restrictions on the machine, and it seems to work out.

• Alan Marshall 07/03/08

  MySpace … Facebook… I tried keeping my teen away, but didn’t succeed. I like the suggestions about helping out in the building of a profile or a page, but who’s to say your teen doesn’t rip the whole thing down when you’re not looking and put up his own pix, blogs, etc. I wouldn’t monitor my kid or check him with software—but we talk about these issues all the time, and I really don’t know that it’s getting through. Maybe I’ll try some of these pointers. Hope it works!

• hazel hoak, Clune, PA 07/02/08

  this gives me a very useful way to approach my three teenage"myspacers" thank you!!!!