My child has over 900 "friends" - but does she know them?

I was at a party at the weekend with a group of my parents friends when Facebook came up in the conversation. Now I’m pretty impressed that my parents are on Facebook, though not particularly surprised that they are not active users. But the majority of parents at the party, although novice users of the site themselves, had children who were very active on Facebook.

As the conversation developed it was interesting to hear the difference in “friend” numbers between parents and their children, or more generally adults and those under 18. I was interested to hear that with sites like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace there are competitions between kids as to how many “friends” they have. The concern on the faces of the parents I was talking to was evident, how many of these 900+ “friends” did their child actually know?

Evidently, children rate their popularity these days by how many online “friends” they can link to on their social networking site, or sites, of choice. This desire to quantify their popularity in such a way encourages kids to accept friendship invitations from anyone who offers, opening up a whole host of issues (something too involved for this post).

Used appropriately, such sites as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace are perfectly safe for both adults and kids. But who is teaching our children how to use these sites appropriately?

As a result I ended up giving out some advice to the worried parents at the party:

1. If you are worried about your child’s use of social networking sites, sit down and talk to them.

2. Go through your child’s “friends” list with them and get them to tell you from where and how they know people. If they can’t give you an answer better than “a friend of a friend of a friend” then talk to your child about what they know about that person, and consider removing them from the list. Do they really have over 900 “real” friends?

3. Discuss with your child what is appropriate information to display and give out over the internet. As adults we generally recognise that we don’t post our address, phone number, passwords, and full itinerary etc over the internet but do our children know this? Has someone sat down and explained it to them?

4. If you are still worried, encourage your child to use the internet in a shared area of the house such as the lounge, study or kitchen. A lot of kids have their own laptops and mobiles these days from a young age (many of my Brownies that I look after do and they are only 7 years old) and hideaway in their bedrooms. Know what sites your child is visiting.

5. Reassure your child that they don’t need to have a huge number of online friends to be popular.

I’d love to hear people’s ideas on this subject as it is a topic I want to cover with my Brownies. Is anyone a parent who has successfully tackled this issue with their children? Do you have any additional advice to give to parents? How young is too young for children to be using social networking sites? Has anyone’s school discussed the use of the internet with children?