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Parents Worried Girls Becoming Addicted to Facebook

by Amar Toor on November 18, 2009 at 07:30 AM

On top of all the natural insecurities and volatile emotions that characterize adolescence, you can now add the girlish gossip-mongering of the Facebook age, where high school dating drama follows gals home and the family laptop becomes the central location of anxiety, woe, and "Oh no, she di-int." Granted, they may just want to have fun, but growing girls don't always have an easy time of it.

To add to the worry, the BBC reports that parents of teenage girls in the U.K. now cite addiction to online social networking as their number one concern. As Jill Berry, the president of the Girls' School Association, puts it, girls are now apparently "permanently connected" to sites like Facebook and Bebo, and parents are worried. At the association's annual conference, Berry detailed parents' concerns over "what to do about their daughters being on the receiving end of 'We hate x' sites or 'honesty boxes' where comments about each other can be posted anonymously."

In a conversation with the BBC, a Facebook spokeswoman countered, "It's equally convenient to characterize TV and video game usage as time-consuming distractions. Yet there's academic research touting the benefits of these activities and services like Facebook." She added that, ultimately, children and parents -- not Facebook -- are responsible for the amount of time and energy expended on the site.

Facebook and its kin are uniquely suited for high school gossip and backstabbing, since social networking is all about image, and in high school, image is everything. Yet, instead of grabbing pitchforks and storming the Facebook gate, it seems as if these parents have accepted the fact that social networking exists and is becoming more ubiquitous. They just want to know how to handle crying jags set off by unfriending. And a parent trying to understand is always good. [From: BBC]

Tags: facebook, girls, internet addiction, InternetAddiction, parents, socialnetworking, teens, top

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