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Annie Fox, M.Ed., is an internationally respected parenting expert, award-winning author, and a trusted online adviser for tweens and teens.

Guest blogger: “I’m 11 and my parents know I’m on Facebook”

August 31, 2011

Guess you'll have to lie about your age

by Rosemina Nazarali
KiwiCommons.com

Kiwi Commons is a late-breaking news, guides and information weblog dedicated to providing readers with the most relevant and up-to-date resources available on youth Internet safety. Kiwi provides readers with a broad range of thoughts and opinions from various experts, including their own Kiwi Expert Panel, to real life stories of the youth affected by these new challenges like sexting, scams, cyberbullying and predators.

It comes as no surprise that a good portion of Facebook users lie about their ages. It does come as a surprise, however, that almost half of all 12-year-olds in the U.S. use social networking websites, despite the site requiring a minimum age of 13.

With no mechanisms in place to detect when a person is lying about their age, there’s no telling who or how many under-agers are actually using Facebook. However, Facebook has taken notice and is kicking out about 20,000 users each day, many of whom are among the 12 and under crowd.

“Facebook uses various methods to identify underage accounts, including the monitoring of information placed on the site and community reports from other users,” said Facebook’s Chief Privacy Advisor, Mozelle Thompson.

With this, however, comes an array of new questions, this time for the parents. Would you let your child lie about their age to sign-up for a social network? This is the hypothetical question that has been burning up the Internet since last week, and many of the differing answers are quite surprising.

“Not only are kids lying about their age, but more often than not, parents teach them to lie about their age,” said Danah Boyd, a social media researcher for Microsoft.

So I became curious. I wanted to know what parents on the Internet were saying about the matter, and what the justification was for either allowing or not allowing their kids to sign-up for Facebook.

Crisntina Flores, a 44-year-old mother to an 11-year-old boy said she did allow him to sign-up for Facebook because she feared he would sign-up behind her back anyway. Her son, Jake, told Facebook he is 15. “It’s not like there’s a legal limit for being on the Internet,” Flores said.

15 of 30 students in one of Jake’s fifth-grade classes are all on Facebook. “It’s lying — and about age,” said the class’s teacher, Aundrea Kaune. “What happens when they want to drink beer?”

“Allowing kids to lie by creating a profile with a false age…is a different issue than allowing activity online that, frankly isn’t even appropriate offline,” one parent, Cameron Sullivan, told the DublinPatch. “Some of my contacts on Facebook have middle-school kids whose pages are open to friends of friends. I don’t have time to waste monitoring other kids’ lives online, but on the rare occasions that I venture to their kids’ pages, I am grateful for the parents’ ignorance. The ability to see what kids are posting online provides a window into the goings-on of some middle-school kids.”

Another parent, Kari Kulac, who let her fourth-grade daughter sign-up for Facebook is starting to question her decision. “It’s only been a couple of months, but I’m unsure whether I should let her continue, not because of safety fears but because it is yet another time suck that has to be monitored along with all the other frivolous electronic pastimes (TV, etc.). I’d rather she be running around outside,” Kulac said. “The benefits, I suppose, are the social enjoyment she has getting to better know my out-of-state side of the family, including my 87-year-old grandmother.”

But it’s not just Facebook kids are fibbing on. Victoria Lai, a ninth-grade student in San Francisco, said she signed up for Yahoo! Games when she was just in the second-grade. “I always say I was born in 1986, not 1996, because it’s just one number different. Easy to remember.”

Victoria’s father, Brian Lai, says that kids “have to experience using the Internet. It’s the future.” He added, “it’s not good to lie, but you can make an exception.”

May Jay Hoal of Yoursphere brings up a point. “Parents can’t forget that Facebook was created by adults and for adults, and the adult culture that lives on Facebook is usually one that we likely wouldn’t expose our children to in the ‘real world.’”

One thing many of these Facebook users who aren’t quite honest about their age don’t realize, is that once you’ve signed up with a certain birth date on Facebook, it cannot be changed. So unless you plan on opening a new account after you hit the age of 13, you’ll be stuck appearing as the wrong age you originally input for a very long time.

After reading what all the parents had to say, I went to Kiwi Commons expert, Doreen Nicastro, to find out how she felt about young people using Facebook before they were ready.

“From both a developmental and safety standpoint, no kids under the age of 13 should have a Facebook account, period end of story,” she said. “Parents are being manipulated and bullied by their own kids to get access to social networking. The fact of the matter, it’s against Facebook terms of agreement for kids under the age of 13!”

Nicastro suggests that the adults start communicating with each other. “Parents, schools and law enforcement in communities across the world need to come together and discuss the rules of the social networking road. New tools require new rules. The problem is that schools are shutting it down, parents are too busy and stressed to get engaged, and kids are running the show.”

While parents and young people continue the ongoing argument surrounding social media use, Facebook is looking for a solution for their under-age users. They are currently considering creating a safe social network for the 12 and under population — a place meant just for kids and a way to dissuade them for signing up for Facebook before the required age.

We want to know — would you let your kids lie about their age to engage on social networking websites like Facebook?

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6 Comments »

  1. My step daughter did and we sat and made her delete both her Facebook and Twitter accounts. The day she turned 13 the first thing she did was re-create that Facebook page. It’s still a time wasting (anti)social network that sucks both her time and ours (monitoring her usage) and frankly I’m shocked at the foul-mouthed way-beyond-their-years things her friends say to her and each other on there. We’re clearly the ONLY parents actually looking to see what their children are up to on there.

    Comment by Bren Faulknor-Murrell — August 31, 2011 @ 8:36 pm

  2. Wow, thanks for shedding light on a subject that does need discussed!
    With grown children of my own and grandkids too little to know what the Internet is I hadn’t thought about the fact that my nephew, who I know is a lt younger that 13, is on Facebook. However he has befriended his Aunts and Uncles so I guess we are his self-imposed monitoring system.
    There is a lo that goes on on FB though that is not for children. I personally make sure that everything on both my personal wall and business fan pages is rated PG, actaually hiding anything I would not want a child looking over my shoulder to see if necessary, but I know most won’t or don’t do that.
    It’s up to parents to monitor their own children, unfortunately too many do not.

    Thanks again for the thought provoking article,
    MaggieB

    Comment by MaggieB — August 31, 2011 @ 9:45 pm

  3. To deny your child access to FB would segregate them from their friends. FB is the equivalent of TV in our day. Remember the kid at school who didn’t know what we were talking about when we droned on about ‘top of the pops’ or ‘mash’? They may well have done better at school and they may well have read a lot more books but their confidence went and that can not so easily be replaced. No one wants to be an outsider especially at the pubescent age. This is today’s way of communicating. FB and twitter. Indeed a lot of useless time is spent twittering and FBing but so is a lot of daydreaming that we all did before we found a keyboard to tap. If you want to monitor your kids (or you feel you need to) be a cool parent and you’ll get an invite to their facebook page (I’m on my kids FB page). Failing that and fearing outside interference then set up a fake profile for yourself and entice your child to accept you as a friend. They won’t even notice that you don’t put much up on your wall since you’ll probably be one of a hundred friends. This is also a great opportunity to enjoy what the youth are badgering on about and the comedy they find funny as links are pasted on their wall by them or others. You can also try to put some thought provoking links up yourself to help stir their young minds. So move on with the times. Enjoy this medium. Don’t take it too seriously and allow your kids to grow.

    Comment by shallow sister — September 4, 2011 @ 2:50 pm

  4. My 11 year old daughter wants a Facebook account but isn’t going to get one. She also wanted a cell phone, but only got one that allows her 10 minutes of call time each month. It’s for emergency calls only, and it’s all she needs. I don’t want her wasting her time texting like her friends do. When we consistently give in every time our children want something, they are learning they can have it all…whether it’s appropriate or not. I told my 11 year old that the rule for FB was that she had to be 13, and we were not going to lie in order for her to have an account. Lying is wrong, and it’s important for her to know it now. I don’t really care that all her friends have lied and have accounts. I’m only responsible for her. If I allow her to lie, what kind of values am I teaching her?

    Comment by Kathie — September 10, 2011 @ 9:23 am

  5. My son is 12 and I allowed him a Facebook page for a few reasons. 1. It is a social activity with his peers. He is on the younger side in his class, so many have turned and will turn 13 before him. It didn’t seem fair to him to exclude him from this activity just because of his age, since he is close. 2. He met many great kids at a camp this summer who were on Facebook and he can maintain contact until he sees them next summer. 3. He is still open to my influence now, so I want to have as much opportunity as I can to teach him how to be socially responsible. It was a requirement to make me his friend AND provide me with the password. We set the account up together so that I could show him how to make everything private. ONLY his friends can see his posts. I would NOT feel comfortable if I did not know his password. He knows I will look at his page, as him. It was not enough to be his friend, because I wanted to see what others were posting that I couldn’t see as his friend. Some of it is a little surprising, but it’s happening whether it’s on Facebook or not. It’s only been about a month, so I may regret it, but at the moment, I feel as though I am more aware of what’s going on in his world. As a result we’ve had some good, relevant conversations.

    Comment by Laurie — September 15, 2011 @ 9:58 pm

  6. My cousins signed up to it underage, with the agreement that her parents can look on it at any time, she also has her family (older cousins, aunts) on Facebook keeping an eye on her activity and anything inappropriate is flagged up straight away and she is disciplined.

    Over 13 sites are the start, when you’re 13 you’ll want to start getting on the over 18 sites, now that’s a problem!

    Facebook is easy to keep an eye on, sites like Habbo Hotel and Chat Roulette are much more of a risk of children

    Comment by Emma — September 20, 2011 @ 1:44 pm

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