Virtual helicopter parenting

We've all heard of helicopter parents, people who hover a lot over every aspect of their children's lives. Well, now there's some hovering happening in cyberspace too, with parents setting up social-networking profiles and attempting to friend their children and all their friends. It's a bit much, and it can get creepy too (and not just from a teen's perspective), when the result is like insisting on being present at their social circle's every hangout. Author/blogger/parent Sharon Cindrich has a great list of tips for guarding against parental Facebook faux pas - "a few basic rules for parents" of social networkers. The overall rule of thumb, I think, is to try to think about how our teens would feel about having a friend's mom's every tidbit of workday and PTA "news" on their "wall" all the time. Check out Sharon's blog for some very good reasons for not letting this happen - and finding a happy medium between helicopter and fly-by parenting.

Many mini-MySpace options now

This blog post could be eye-opening for parents or anyone who might think putting any single social site's feet to the fire would take care of teen social-Web safety problems: TechCrunch looks at "Nine Ways to Build Your Own Social Network". In other words, if MySpace or Facebook somehow went away - besides the option of simply moving to another social site based in the US or not - teens of course have the option to create their own personal social-networking site (this is really no different from the days when it seemed novel to be able to create your own blog, and services like Blogger made it supremely easy with templates and color schemes, etc.). I've written about Ning in the past (see "Do-it-yourself social sites" and "Mini-MySpaces"). Now Ning is just one of nine such sites in a single category of the possibilities available for personal social sites (not pages or profiles or blogs but entire mini-Facebooks, -Bebos, or -MySpaces). The services in this first category are hosted by the service (for free, and anyone can create his/her site in 10 minutes or less). The other two categories get higher-end; the first type you put on your own server, which is no big deal for many teens; the third is more a business solution, where a company custom-builds a social site for its client. I'm sure the state attorneys general have been focusing on MySpace for so long are aware of this, right?