Parents are great. They fed you; they clothed you; they are the reason you exist. I'm personally very close to my parents, but obviously they don't need to know everything that I get up to.
For example, I don't particularly want them to see the picture of me walking home from a party at 7am when I decided that one leg of my tights would look better as a knee sock. As far as they know, I was in bed by 9pm with a good book and a cuppa.
But with social media, the "perfectly behaved" facade is harder to keep.
Why is this? Well, my parents are on Facebook, and they added me. At first I was reluctant to accept, but after accusations of being completely devoid of parental love were thrown about, I gave in. What harm can it do, I thought. There is absolutely no way they will actually use Facebook. It is completely beyond them.
How very wrong I was. Almost instantly, my parents had blossoming online social lives. Within weeks of accepting their requests, I discovered many reasons why I shouldn't have.
One: My parents are snoops. Completely unabashed snoops.
One day I spied my mother creeping on my Facebook page, slowly scrolling through my tagged photos. The absolute horror! Then she turned to me and asked: “That boy with you in your profile picture. Is he your boyfriend?” I don't need to tell you that this is never a conversation you want to have with your mother.
Two: They think everything you post on Facebook is up for family discussion.
In my phone calls home, my parents began to mention events that I definitely hadn't informed them of. How did they know I was at a Father Ted table quiz? Facebook. They also started referencing statuses and pictures I put up. To counter this, I made conscious efforts to tone down any sort of coarse language that might appear in my posts. The same could not be said for my pals, who cursed in comments and wall posts with the gleeful vigour of small children learning bad words for the first time. I thought I would be forgiven. Not so.
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“That status you posted the other day, why was there such swearing in it? Your uncle (who is a priest) is on Facebook too, you know.”
My father, who advanced to Twitter a few months after joining Facebook, once laughed out loud for seemingly no reason while watching TV. When we all inquired as to what was so funny, he responded by reading out something I had just tweeted. Which happened to be about something my mother said. Morto.
Three: You become, in their eyes, the expert on everything Facebook related.
Though they are now part of the Facebook universe, my parents still don’t understand it. I once spent a good half hour explaining the difference between “friend” pages and “like” pages to my aunt and mother, with each of us becoming increasingly agitated and confused as the minutes passed. My mother also has trouble understanding that Facebook is, for all intents and purposes, a public place. The fact that other people might see what Mary Murphy posted on her own personal wall sends her into a blind panic.
You might think I’m a dope for accepting them in the first place, but what could I do? I can't forbid them from using Facebook or Twitter. My rule of thumb for dealing with parents on social media is simple: block them from statuses, block them from tagged photos - just block, block, and block again.
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What's your method? Refuse the friend request, or accept and hit the block button!
What's happened when your parents spotted you on social media?
