My kid and Facebook

For those that don’t know, Samantha is 10 and yes, I allow her a Facebook account.  But she’s only allowed to log in around Cheri or I, she doesn’t even have the email or password that I set up for her so she can’t log in elsewhere.  So yes, I allow her a Facebook account, but I monitor everything she does.  Which is what happened today.

I knew something was up when Samantha got a friend request from some guy in Africa who had a mutual friend of this classmate.  I denied the request and let it go figuring the classmate is like most kids and friends everyone they know and don’t know.  It’s stupid, but kids do it, and I approve all of Samantha’s friends so it wasn’t a big deal.  But it made me wonder what’s up with this kid.

She started chatting with the classmate on Facebook the last few days.  I told Samantha it was time to log off on Saturday (yes, I monitor her time), she told the classmate and the classmate kept asking why this and why that.  I finally took the laptop and put – This is Samantha’s dad, I told her it was time to log off and she’ll log off.  It isn’t time for 20 questions.  Then closed it.  Again, I overlooked it because the classmate is like most kids now-a-days and has no boundaries.  It’s sad, but it’s very true.  I see it all the time.

Then tonight, I was changing some settings on the kids user name and I went through her messages back and forth, nothing big there.  Just hey this, hey that.  Basic 10 year old stuff.  I don’t think either of them completed a full sentence.  But then I noticed her profile picture, something wasn’t right about it.

You can see what I circled.  The bottom right is obvious, the top right says “Fuck me, I’m famous”.  What the hell?  So I start scrolling through her timeline, and it doesn’t take me long before I came across a picture of 2 toys, kind of paper clip like but not quite, in a sexual position, and she puts “Does anyone see what they are doing?” or something to that effect.  I immediately went and unfriended her.  I wish I would have copied that picture over here first but I just wanted her gone.

Now tomorrow, I have to be the mean dad and tell her that she can’t chat with her on Facebook anymore.  Or Cheri might have to since I work till 7.

What I want to know is where the hell is this kids parents?  I’m really tempted to contact her parents to tell them but it’s apparent to me that they don’t care.  I have a phone number for the classmate but I don’t know if it’s her parents or hers.  Samantha tends to think that she has her own laptop so it wouldn’t surprise me that she would have her own cellphone.  I feel like I could probably contact their teacher and have him contact the parents but I don’t want to make it a school issue.  One side of me says it’s none of my business and to leave it alone.  I would want someone to tell me if it was the other way around but I also tend to be a lot more strict with my kids than most.  And I get the feeling, most parents don’t want to know.  They’d probably get upset at me, I know it’s the negativity I have towards other parents because I believe most just don’t care anymore.  That’s why kids are the way they are.  Not all, or even most, but there are a lot of them that don’t respect adults, use adult language and all in all, pay little mind to anything or anyone around them.  It all starts with the parents.  I believe I spoke of this before in the post “Be AFRAID, Be Very AFRAID.”  You should go read that if you’ve made it this far, it’s one of my better posts but was before I really had a following.