Parents and children meet and clash on social-networking sites - WSJ.com

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• By ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN

David Rivera recently had someone "unfriend" him on Facebook: His own child.

For months, Dr. Rivera, an obstetrician in Lombard, Ill., had been exasperated that his 25-year-old son, Nate, often complained he was broke and asked for money, yet posted photos of himself on Facebook taken at bars, restaurants, movies and concerts.

Dr. Rivera says he tried to talk to his son, a senior in college, about his spending habits, but his son refused to listen. Frustrated, he finally wrote on his son's Facebook wall: "I can see what you are blowing your money on, so don't come whining to me about money."

"I think they figure that their friends are watching but we're not, because they think we are old and decrepit and we barely know how to turn the computer on," says Dr. Rivera, 54-years-old, of being a parent.

In the new era of helicopter parenting, more and more parents and kids are meeting up, and clashing, on Facebook, MySpace and other social-networking sites.

Nate Rivera, who lives in Chicago, says he unfriended his father for several reasons, including his comment about money and other "snide" remarks. "It was mildly pestering," he says. "I thought, 'Do I need this?' "

In my last column, I wrote about how our behavior on Facebook can harm our real-world relationships. That article prompted a great deal of response, including a number of letters from parents who wrote about how social-networking sites and texting have become a powerful means to stay connected to—and to spy on—their teenagers and young-adult children. As one father put it: "It's so much easier to keep track of what they eat and when they pick their nose this way."

Many kids dread getting a friend request from Mom or Dad. There's even a Web site, www.myparentsjoinedfacebook.com, where people post screen views of their parents' most embarrassing posts. Recently, these included one mother telling her daughter to stop drinking sodas because she had cavities, another mother requesting "intervention should she ever wear twill, tapered-leg, buttless mom jeans," and the results of one stepfather's "Which sex position fits you best?" quiz.

"Mom, it's like my friends and I are standing around having a conversation and you interrupt and say, 'Hi, guys! What are you doing?' " says Andrew Doerfler, a 17-year-old high school senior in West Grove, Penn.

Andrew has a solution for embarrassing mom posts, like the amusement she expressed after he linked to a video of the rock star Bret Michaels getting hit in the head by a prop at the Tony Awards: He deletes them immediately. (His mom, Megan Reese, a 40-year-old insurance-industry recruiting manager, says she's not trying to annoy her son, but just trying to stay aware of what's going on in his life.)

Parents of teens are used to being snubbed, of course, but it's getting harder for kids to ignore mom and dad when they have access to their children's entire virtual social life.

When Dave Hill's twin 14-year-old daughters Maddie and Megan wanted to create Facebook profiles in May, he laid down rules: They would have to be friends with him, and he would have to be friends with all their friends.

"Part of this is being a careful parent and part of it is being in law enforcement for so long, and knowing what kind of freaks are out there," says Mr. Hill, a 46-year-old police lieutenant in Orange, Calif.

When he's working late shifts, he sometimes checks in briefly with his daughters on Facebook so he can hear about their day or say good night. He also likes to comment on their pictures. Once, when Maddie forgot to log out, he posted a status update under her name: "My dad is the coolest guy in the world."

The girls mostly take it in stride. "I think he's funny, but not all the time," says Megan, who admits she likes when her dad comments that she looks pretty in pictures. Adds Maddie: "Our parents are looking out for us, and making sure no one is posting bad stuff."

"Facebook is kind of like a parenting tool," says Joel O'Driscoll, a 41-year-old father of eight in Woodside, Calif.

Mr. O'Driscoll likes to keep tabs on whom his 18-year-old daughter, Holly, is friends with on Facebook—especially the boys.

Several times recently, he says, he's used information he discovered on his daughter's Facebook page to spark a discussion with her in person, most recently about the need for a boy to ask her out by calling, rather than texting or emailing.

"It's a good way to have some contact in your child's life," says Mr. O'Driscoll, an executive at a consulting firm.

Holly O'Driscoll says she's fine with her dad monitoring her friends on Facebook. "I think it's sensible," she says. Still, she admits she sometimes blocks him from seeing her status updates, explaining she doesn't want him to see how often she's on Facebook.

For many parents, Facebook and MySpace are helpful conversation starters, particularly with older teens or young adults. Just ask Cherie Miller, who has seven sons, ages 15 to 28. She says she not only stays in touch via social-networking sites with the ones who no longer live at home; she also learns things about them she wouldn't otherwise know. "You know how boys are," says the 53-year-old mom, who administers a graduate-degree program at Kennesaw State University near Atlanta. "It's very hard to pull conversations out of them."

Thanks to pictures posted on her 21-year-old son's page, Mrs. Miller learned he started smoking and whom he is dating. She then talked to her son about the choices he was making, using private messages sent on Facebook. On this platform, she says, "you can get more words out of him. It's less threatening." Her son couldn't be reached for comment.

This virtual parenting is fine, experts say, but just to a point. "How would you feel if you were a teen and your mom listened in to every single conversation," says Neil Bernstein, an adolescent psychologist in Washington, D.C., and author of "There When He Needs You: How to Be an Available, Involved and Emotionally Connected Father to Your Son."

Dr. Bernstein says the danger of monitoring kids too closely through technology is that it may make them sneakier. "As we become better detectives, they become better fugitives," he says.

The bottom line: Relationships need boundaries. And so he suggests some guidelines: It's OK for parents to require younger kids and teens to accept their friend requests, but kids should gain more freedom as they get older, just as they do in real life. Also, parents should be open with their kids about whether they are monitoring their page.

Perhaps as Generation Facebook grows up, the virtual parent-child relationship will sort itself out. We're already seeing proof.

When 25-year-old Brandon Hendelman helped his mom set up her Facebook profile last year, he kept the password. He has used it to log on to her account and remove pictures of himself from his "awkward" teen-age stage, and sometimes to delete friends of his that she has befriended.

But he leaves up all the cute pictures of him as a kid, and admits he sometimes slyly steers girls he likes to his mom's page, telling them, "It's so embarrassing, my mom posts all these pictures of me. Please don't look." Once the girls see how cute he was and how fun his mom is, he says, they like him better.

"She's my virtual wingman," says Mr. Hendelman, a junior equity-derivatives broker in New York.

Does Diana Hendelman mind? "We're complicit," she says. The 51-year-old from Palm City, Fla., uses Facebook to check up on her son when she hasn't heard from him for a day or so. And she has no problem when he sometimes controls her page. "I would ignore a friend request from my own mom," she says.

—Email: Bonds@wsj.com