How much do you feel you can trust difficult child to keep personal info off the site, to not accept friend requests, to generally be safe and smart?
Do you think it would be safer to agree to a page and check it daily (and could you check it daily?) or to have him sneak and get a page that you don't know about and/or can't check? I had to make a facebook page in order to find my difficult child's facebook page - he was able to keep me/the grandparents out of it very successfully by blocking us/refusing our requests to see it when he had things on there he was sneaking/hiding/would get in trouble for.
What would the judge/GAL/PO think or say?
Well, to the questions in the first paragraph, I would say "a litte but not a lot". Making him give me the password would probably be the safest approach- and letting me sign up as a friend- however that works. difficult child is the type that during stable periods, he is generally a good kid. During rocky periods, he will push the limits and sneak some (I guess he lives by the motto "a little bit won't hurt", then, when things are really unstable, well, all bets are off) I can see my difficult child doing exactly what yours did at times.
This mess with the computer started right before he got into trouble legally last year because he wanted a myspace page and I said no. So, he called my bro (we were all still speaking at the time but apparently my bro already had a "plan") and my bro taught him how to set a myspace page up while I was at work one afternoon. difficult child told me afterwards so then I talked to him about safety and my concerns, etc., rather than tell him to take it off because I figured he wouldn't take it off and would just sneak at that point. So, he suggested that since he really just wanted to say he had a myspace page, that he could act like he was somebopdy different then who he really is so no wierdo could really seek him out. I agreed to let him portray himself as a 25 yo male and he put a photo of some man he'd gotten off the internet on there. Really, I was ok with that because I figured that no pervert looking for a kid/teen would look at that page and the worst thing that could happen would be that a girl in her 20's would be communicating with difficult child until she figured out that he probably was a fake. (difficult child had no interested in communicating with anyone other than attractive females at the time)
Anyway, after difficult child got into trouble and a GAL was aassigned, my bro contacted the GAL and told her that I allowed my son to have a myspace page and that difficult child was trying to make social contacts with adults. He also told her some other things (in a skewed version) trying to make it look like I allowed a lot of inappropriate, unsafe stuff- some of it was stuff that I was battling with difficult child about- not that I ever ALLOWED. But my bro misrepresented it, and used that to justify him getting custody- which of course, didn't work in the end. Never mind that it was my bro who taught difficult child how to set up the myspace page behind my back in the first place. (Bro, of course, left details like that out of his story to the GAL.)
So, I think the judge and GAL finally feel assured (after a year) that I am not the kind of parent who lets their kid do whatever he wants and that I do care about his safety and well-being. Both of them are pretty much out of the picture at this point unless difficult child gets into legal trouble again- or breaks a rule of probation. The PO, well, she
probably would agree that if it is legal and I supervised his activities, then it would be ok, which is how I feel. As long as it doesn't make difficult child a sitting duck for adults looking for kids/teens. That is my biggest concern- it seems like all those pages do that, yet almost all kids have them. So, I wonder if other parents know a way to check on their kids pages without them knowing it, or if all those parents really have that much trust in their difficult children.
