Daniel ShollerOn a friend of mine’s social networking site, he has many pictures of his kids. Recently, he posted one of his son goofing off in (what I think is) his religious school class at church. It occurred to me that kids think that they have an advantage now, because they can chat online without their dorky parents overhearing them. (I remember taking the cordless phone into the bathtub to try to avoid being overheard) But social-network aware parents can use the power of the Internet to keep the kids in line as well. After all, I have lots of photos of my kids that they will no doubt find embarrassing when they are teenagers, and I know how to put them places where their friends can find them…
it seems logical to me that the discourses that we have in public in our daily lives, includes those that involve disciplining our children, will be replicated in the online social networking world. Or more to the point, if they are not, then it will be very clear that this world is only a limited representation of the social interactions that we have. So, I am anxiously awaiting more goofing-off kid pictures. On the other hand, most of us try to keep that activity confined to the places where it is really necessary. After all, it is not always the best idea to have that kind of conversation in public. As we use these kinds of sites and the line between public, between friends and private gets more difficult to police, there will no doubt be many familial challenges about what was posted on Facebook.
I can see it now in the latest parenting handbooks:
Chapter 5. Rewards and punishments: When to bribe with candy and when to “out” them on myspace -
Category: Social networking Tags: child rearing, children, Social networking
3 responses so far ↓
1 John Singer October 29, 2008 at 10:12 am
Facebook is no different than email at work – if you don’t want your boss to read it then don’t write it. Kids learn this lesson the hard way when they post something personal and then discover that all the parents are monitoring the action.
2 Dan Sholler October 29, 2008 at 10:17 am
You are right John, but what happened here was the opposite… the parent put evidence of the kids’ poor behavior on his facebook page. (the kid wasn’t behaving poorly on the internet, he was behaving poorly in class). I was just amused that I had not seen this as a disciplinary technique before, but he tells me it worked.
3 Anthony Bradley November 7, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Wow! This is innovative parenting
. Similarities between social goals in the workplace and those in private life abound. After all, it is all about relationships. We talk about using the community to incent good behaviors what about “dissing” (disincenting vs. disrespecting 
) people to curtail bad behavior. Well I remember an old leadership tenet from my time in the Marines that goes, “Praise in public and reprimand in private.” I used to believe in that tenet and I still think it works with small groups. But it doesn’t scale well to mass collaboration and community behaviors. I don’t know about taking off-line behaviors and exposing them on-line as bad but I am seeing a best practice emerge in social governance of “badging” bad behavior for all to see and learn from rather than deleting it quitely with no one the wiser. Good post Dan, it made me think which is, for me, the hallmark of a good post.