Number one daughter, Katrina, showed me a new icon she had just installed on her iPad.
It had a lower case f surrounded by a blue box.
Oh boy.
Katrina had just had her 13th birthday a few days previous, and she reminded me that I said she couldn’t have Facebook until she reached their minimum age, 13. In other cultures, you become an adult. In ours, you can join Facebook.
Katrina had also worked very hard over the weekend, cutting grass and scrubbing various vehicles with gusto. Maybe she was killing the always useful, “We don’t reward bad behaviour” tactic. Alright, it was time to give in.
We had some missteps with her first encounter with social media, Instagram, and that resulted in her account being wiped and creating a new account later. But she seems to have found her groove with that. As for SnapChat, my response remains, “Hell no! That’s designed specifically so parents don’t know what’s going on.”
It’s a non-starter.
As for Facebook, I started with the rules: You friend mom and dad first, and you never hide anything from us. You don’t post anything that you wouldn’t be proud to show your grandma (whom she friended third) or a boss, and you don’t click like on everything you see. Only friend people you know in real life. I also get full access when I so choose, and keep your privacy settings high.
A few minutes later I returned to find Katrina and Spencer laughing uproariously at the photos they had found I had posted over the years. I don’t know if I had ever heard her laugh so hard or obnoxiously in my life. They particularly found a picture I took a couple years ago amusing. I had spent the day sanding paint while shirtless, and I was covered in dark dust from top to bottom. I did one of those selfies in the mirror that is apparently the in thing with younger, attractive women, except that my extra 50 pounds made my belly look like a dirt-lined basketball. I commented, “As an answer to all those duck face cheesecake selfies, this is a hard workin’ man selfie. Spent the day sanding the entire deck after I painted the garage door. I look like I came off the 4020 after a day of harrowing.”
I guess there’s a new rule: don’t post anything you don’t want your daughter or son to see, either. That includes years later, too.
It’s difficult to escape the social media world when raising kids now. I’ve had Facebook for something like 10 years now, and since I’ve worked at home for nearly all those years, it’s often been one of my few social outlets. It’s allowed me to remain somewhat sane as a social human being.
For Katrina’s cadet squadron, the unit’s Facebook page is its primary method of disseminating information, and it works very well. When I was an officer from 2001-2008, we could never assume that every family had something as simple as email. Today, internet and smartphones are so prevalent that one might think the world revolved around them.
Facebook’s recently added live streaming feature had a huge impact on how I gather news. Working for an industry newspaper, two hours away from Regina, I was often overlooked when it came to the daily goings on in the capital, some of which had a direct impact on my beat. But now there’s much less need to attend a scrum in Regina, as I can watch them live on several different streams. I can’t ask a question this way, but for many of these items, the obvious questions are already asked by those present. Additionally, I can often watch a whole, unedited press conference, pulling out the things I need that others might edit out.
I’m sure we’re going to have our trials and tribulations along the way with a teenager on social media. But what isn’t a trial or tribulation with a teenager in the first place? She’ll make mistakes, we’ll make mistakes. But we’ll learn from them. No matter what, we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist.
That also means, for the parents, our kids are in the audience, too. Oh happy day.
