Do you monitor your kids social media/phone?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Eh. Partially. She's very street smart and modest so although I check in I'm not worried. I did freak the other day when her friend sent her a link to the 21 best cocks or something but it was chickens.

That is hilarious. That sounds like something my daughter would do, who is also street smart and modest.

I check my daughter's text messages from time to time. It's usually pretty boring stuff. She usually makes good decisions, and she has seen the fallout from kids circulating naked pictures of other girls in her school. I send her links to articles about kids getting blackmailed with nude pics. I have to have faith in her choices because monitoring apps aren't really that useful.

Do you read the ones just on her phone or also the deleted ones from your cell phone carrier? Kids delete the text they don't want parents to see

Do you read her Instagram and also her Finstagram too? Most kids do a good family/college friendly social media accounts and then make up others to air our their dirty laundry

Do you allow Snapchat? You have no idea what goes on in that.

Do you you disable her ability to delete her web searches? If not, you have no idea what she is doing and searching online.

Do you disable her ability to delete apps she uploads - needing a code from you to delete? If not she can delete her apps every night and re-up them each morning.

Do you know about all the apps that make the apps she doesn't want you to see disappear on her phone? If not she can hide any apps she doesn't want you to know your using.

No, I don't check those things. I would have mentioned it. She shows me a lot of the things she finds on the social media she follows. If she wants to look at porn and hide it, there's not much I can do about that. She is going to have to make her own decisions. If I have to follow every single thing she does online, why would I bother giving her a phone?

Are you a parent of a teen or a younger child? Teens need to learn to make decisions, even if it means they make mistakes from time to time. I can't micromanage every Instagram post. She will be an adult soon. We talk about consequences. She sees the consequences in her school. I leave most of the rest up to her. If she was getting into trouble or making bad decisions, I'd be checking more. Learning independence is more important than making sure she doesn't see any "bad things" online. The world has bad stuff in it. I'm pretty sure it's not going away anytime soon. She will have to learn to deal with it.

So because a 13yr old will eventually be an adult, we just sever the ties? Honestly this is some scary shit here that most parents seem to do. They helicopter their child's every move on a playground, won't let them go off in elementary school to play in the neighborhood, but then hand them a smartphone at age 11 and say they will learn from their mistakes.

Where did I say I was talking about 11 or 13 year olds? At some point, you have to give them some independence. If you can't trust your teen with an Instagram account, how the hell are you going to hand over the keys to your car?

THANK YOU, thank you, thank you!

The Woe_Are_You_Most_Ignorant_Parent treatises are so annoying.

I won't just hand my kids the keys to a car once they get a driver's license and say "go have fun" and hope that he is safe. There is a process and the OP's teen JUST got a phone.

But it is obvious we don't parent the same way. You just hope. I teach.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes, I have monitoring software on my 11yr old's phone. It turns off data during certain hours and even then only allows a certain amount of data a day. I can see absolutely everything he does, down to his exact location.

He's still a child, so my main concern at this point is making sure his face is not jammed in it all hours of the day and night and that I know where he is. We live in the city and he's on metro a lot and has a lot of free range. I wouldn't unleash him on the city without one.

What software do you use?

Net Nanny

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Eh. Partially. She's very street smart and modest so although I check in I'm not worried. I did freak the other day when her friend sent her a link to the 21 best cocks or something but it was chickens.

That is hilarious. That sounds like something my daughter would do, who is also street smart and modest.

I check my daughter's text messages from time to time. It's usually pretty boring stuff. She usually makes good decisions, and she has seen the fallout from kids circulating naked pictures of other girls in her school. I send her links to articles about kids getting blackmailed with nude pics. I have to have faith in her choices because monitoring apps aren't really that useful.

Do you read the ones just on her phone or also the deleted ones from your cell phone carrier? Kids delete the text they don't want parents to see

Do you read her Instagram and also her Finstagram too? Most kids do a good family/college friendly social media accounts and then make up others to air our their dirty laundry

Do you allow Snapchat? You have no idea what goes on in that.

Do you you disable her ability to delete her web searches? If not, you have no idea what she is doing and searching online.

Do you disable her ability to delete apps she uploads - needing a code from you to delete? If not she can delete her apps every night and re-up them each morning.

Do you know about all the apps that make the apps she doesn't want you to see disappear on her phone? If not she can hide any apps she doesn't want you to know your using.

No, I don't check those things. I would have mentioned it. She shows me a lot of the things she finds on the social media she follows. If she wants to look at porn and hide it, there's not much I can do about that. She is going to have to make her own decisions. If I have to follow every single thing she does online, why would I bother giving her a phone?

Are you a parent of a teen or a younger child? Teens need to learn to make decisions, even if it means they make mistakes from time to time. I can't micromanage every Instagram post. She will be an adult soon. We talk about consequences. She sees the consequences in her school. I leave most of the rest up to her. If she was getting into trouble or making bad decisions, I'd be checking more. Learning independence is more important than making sure she doesn't see any "bad things" online. The world has bad stuff in it. I'm pretty sure it's not going away anytime soon. She will have to learn to deal with it.

So because a 13yr old will eventually be an adult, we just sever the ties? Honestly this is some scary shit here that most parents seem to do. They helicopter their child's every move on a playground, won't let them go off in elementary school to play in the neighborhood, but then hand them a smartphone at age 11 and say they will learn from their mistakes.

Where did I say I was talking about 11 or 13 year olds? At some point, you have to give them some independence. If you can't trust your teen with an Instagram account, how the hell are you going to hand over the keys to your car?

THANK YOU, thank you, thank you!

The Woe_Are_You_Most_Ignorant_Parent treatises are so annoying.

I won't just hand my kids the keys to a car once they get a driver's license and say "go have fun" and hope that he is safe. There is a process and the OP's teen JUST got a phone.

But it is obvious we don't parent the same way. You just hope. I teach.

You should reread the previous posts in the above quotes. It doesn't say that. You sound a little nuts. I suspect you don't have teens and are trying to apply parenting rules for 10 year olds to 14-16 year olds. When you have a 15 year old, come back and see us.

[Anonymous]

No. I trust that my 13 year old follows the few rules we have set up, because they are kept to a minimum, are truly essential to safety, and she participated in the process of deciding upon them so we have her buy-in.

We didn't monitor our older DDs (now ages 21 and 23) phones or Internet (beyond the Antivirus set up on our home network that protects all of our computers), and that seems to have worked out fine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No. I trust that my 13 year old follows the few rules we have set up, because they are kept to a minimum, are truly essential to safety, and she participated in the process of deciding upon them so we have her buy-in.

We didn't monitor our older DDs (now ages 21 and 23) phones or Internet (beyond the Antivirus set up on our home network that protects all of our computers), and that seems to have worked out fine.

That may be so, however, things have changed immensely since 2008, when your older DDs were 13 and 15. Kids that age were not using social media at that time and phones did not have the apps that are now available. In fact there were very few smart phones on the market then, with the iphone barely on the market for one year. You are kiding yourself if you think your 13 year old is operating in the same world your older kids did as young teens. You think you can rely solely on trust? Good luck with that.