Does your child have a Facebook page? Do you ever look at it?

I look at A’s page at least once a day. I look at her status, as well as what everyone else is posting on her page. I am Facebook friends with most of her friends. My best friends are friends with A so they can keep an eye out too. In fact, when I allowed her to get a page, I required that she be friends with me and my two besties. Some might call this spying but I call it being a good parent. She is very aware that we all check her page and pay attention to what her friends are saying.

Over the weekend I noticed that a middle school girl, who we don’t know because she goes to a local Catholic school instead of my daughter’s school, was cussing up a storm on one of A’s classmate’s pages.  M, the classmate, knows the cussing girl who we will refer to as K. She was using every word you can imagine. She was referring to M’s classmates. It was obvious that she was jealous that M had other friends. M asked her to stop but she continued to use the F word and refer to M’s friends as the B word. Another mom actually commented basically asking the girl to clean up her language. Instead, the girl started making inappropriate comments about the mom. Another friend of M’s, L, also asked the girl to stop and said K was being rude. That just made K go off even more. The last time I checked, there were 72 comments on this post, most of them made by K and including very inappropriate language. M also used a few choice words but never used them to call someone a name. It was still inappropriate though considering she is only in the seventh grade and Facebook is a public forum.

As I read this, all I could think is “where are their parents?” I would be mortified if I ever found out my daughter talked like this but to put it on Facebook, out in public for everyone to see, would probably send me to the bottom of a wine bottle! What was amazing to me is this went on for at least 24 hours and no one, other than the mom of a friend, ever stepped in. How did their mothers not see this? I would have seen it within the first few hours or heard from one of my friends. I would have immediately deleted the posts (yes, I have her password), made her delete K, the foul mouth friend, and then called K’s mom. These posts are still up as I write this. I don’t want to harshly judge another parent because I believe we all do the best we can but this really bothers me.

Do you monitor your child’s Facebook? What about their text messages? How would you have handled this situation if your child was involved? Do you think I should have stepped in even though I don’t know K at all and barely know M? I want to hear your thoughts!