Should I look at my child's MySpace page?

Is ignorance bliss? Should you look at all? Wait a minute, you might be saying. I'm not ready to do this. I don't really want to know what my child is doing on MySpace. I might learn something I don't want to know. And I completely understand -- the fact that your teen may be in the midst of healthy experimentation with identity, expression, and even sexuality on the cyber-screen can be daunting.

I mean, how much should Mom or Dad be privy to during these coming-of-age years? Should you know that your daughter is in a bitter argument with two of her closest friends? Should you know which girls your son finds attractive? Do you really need to read about your child's friends who feel hopeless about French class? Many psychologists feel teens need to have their own space, their own private domain in which to play with desires, curiosities, and dramas. It's not always necessary for parents to be intimately involved in such matters. After all, allowing teens to experience and resolve their own conflicts is simply part of the maturation process that is so integral to becoming a healthy adult.

But it's not private
Of course, a MySpace page or LiveJournal blog is not a private diary or person-to-person e-mail; these are public, and accessing your child's page is not akin to steaming open a sealed letter or unlocking a personal diary. So now the waters get a little murky. Why should you ignore your child's private profile when hundreds of so-called friends are viewing it freely anytime and anywhere? The other issue at hand is the interactive element of a MySpace profile. While it may take some restraint for a concerned parent to refrain from opening that mysterious letter or diary, there does exist some sense of comfort in knowing that these items are truly private. Although our children seem to believe we are aliens from one of Saturn's rings, we have all received special letters, sent private e-mails, and kept personal journals. We can understand that landscape, so allowing our kids that level of privacy is really not that scary -- it's culturally familiar.

However, MySpace presence is culturally unfamiliar to most parents. And as columnist Ellen Goodman puts it, "The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children out-weigh our fears." You're still only an immigrant (on a temporary visa) to MySpace, and therefore not completely at home with it all. It's not that easy to refrain from snooping. And most importantly, the fact is that one single MySpace profile can (and does) attract thousands of random add requests, unedited advertisments, endless messages, unsolicited images, and total access to terribly inappropriate content. In short, your child can surf or link to any number of adult content groups, forums, blogs, or profiles. A MySpace profile is not a letter, an e-mail or a diary; it is a public, social, adult site that poses many risks for teenagers. This is one reason why I believe you are fully justified in making an appointment to meet your cyber-child.

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Excerpted from Generation MySpace: Helping Your Teen Survive Online Adolescence: How Social Networking is Changing Everything About Friendship, Gossip, Sex, Drugs, and Our Kids' Values by Candice M. Kelsey. Copyright 2007 by Candice M. Kelsey. Excerpted by permission of Marlowe and Company, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.