Students beware: moms on Facebook

It's awkward getting a Facebook friend request from someone you don't want to befriend: an ex, that one girl who went to your high school but you don't actually know or, horror of horrors, your parents. "My brother has a Facebook, and he will not friend (our parents)," said Andrea Westerlund, a junior English major. "He has to make up all these excuses, like 'Oh, I tried to friend you, but it won't work!'"

This has become a reality for some Bonaventure students as more of the baby boomer generation joins the popular social networking Web site.

Parents joining Facebook has sparked mixed emotions among Bonaventure students.

"Facebook is not for our parent's generation," said Westerlund. "They're only doing it to either try to live vicariously or to stalk their children. Parents have their own social networking tools, and we have ours."

Some parents have been using Facebook for their own social lives, not to stalk their children.

"My dad has his own little friends," said Sondra Cummings, a sophomore English major. "In fact, he didn't want to friend me because he wanted to keep things in his own group and keep family somewhat separate."

Allie Ayala also said her mother keeps her Facebook life separate from her daughter's.

"She doesn't get into my business or read my wall posts and confront me about them or anything," said the freshman biology major. "In general, I find it to be creepy, but I think my mom is an exception because she has her own thing going on."

Ayala isn't the only student to find this phenomenon strange.

"It is kind of creepy, if they're on their children's pages constantly, but other than that, they have every right," said Chris Britten, a junior music and theater major. "It doesn't bother me. If you think about it, Facebook turned into a social networking thing instead of just college, and parents have every right to go on and meet new people, too."

Some students even enjoy having their parents just a few clicks away.

"Facebook isactually pretty convenient in regards to having another form of communication," Courtney Cobb, a sophomore special education major, wrote in an e-mail. "I don't always have time to talk on the phone on a regular basis, so I think it's neat that we can keepeveryone updated through simple messages on Facebook."

Lindsey Peterson finds her mom on Facebook as a source of entertainment.

"I like talking to my mom on Facebook," said the senior elementary and special education major. "It's just hysterical, because she makes a big fuss about it, and she doesn't get it."

For those of you who still don't want mommy dearest seeing pictures of how many friends you made last weekend, James Buttram offered a potential solution.

"Everyone that I know who has parents on Facebook, they make lists of people they don't want to see certain pictures," said the senior history major. "They're not blocked, because you have to friend them because they're your parents, but if you don't want them to see certain things, you can make it so lists of friends can see certain pictures."

Buttram, however, has an even simpler solution.

"I just tell my parents not to do Facebook."

Cobb thinks parents join Facebook at their own risk.

"My mom is mature, and she knows that by 'friending' me, she is going to see some personalthings or maybe inside jokes between my friends and I, but that's her risk of joining Facebook," she wrote."At the same time, I think she knows that I am a college student trying to learn and experience as much as I can."

kleinaj@sbu.edu