Practicum 3 - Sara

I already did one interview with a tween about what sites she uses, but I wanted to get another perspective so I interviewed a kid that my sister babysits. I asked her the same kind of questions that I asked the other girl I interviewed and she had both similar and different answers. "Susie" is allowed on Facebook and many other web sites that the first girl was not allowed on, but her mom knows all of her passwords and can check up on her whenever she wants. I asked Susie if she cared that her mom did this and she said that it was okay because it meant that she could have a Facebook to interact with her friends. This makes me wonder if other families do something similar to this as well. I think that Susie may feel different about this situation when she gets a little older (she's twelve now) because she will want more privacy. This makes me bring up the question again of: Will you allow your children use Social Networking Sites such as Facebook? I had a few more questions that we weren't able to get to in our presentation so I will post them here. What age to believe is old enough to use sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc.? What sites did you use when you were younger (13 and under)? Will there always be the "next best site"? For example, many people used to use MySpace, and now many of them use Facebook. As I do more research on sites that "tweens" use, I get many mixed reviews about what kids should be allowed to do on the Internet and what they shouldn't do. It's hard to say what I will do as a parent, but at least I have plenty of time to decide!