Parents Lying About Tweens’ Ages

Why are parents permitting their tweens to have social networking accounts when they are underage? There are reasons behind why Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Pinterest, just to name a few, prohibit children under 13 to have an account. One of the main reasons is for the safety of the children.

What type of message are parents sending to their tweens?  That it is okay to lie and bend the rules when the rules don’t fit into what they want. Parents need to stop and think about what their tweens are learning from them when they set-up a social networking account for underage tweens. Believe it or not, but parents are role models to their children and their children do look up to them and remember what type of actions they see from their parents.  It is very hard these days not to want to give in to your tweens when they say “everyone has this” or “everyone gets to do this.”  However, part of the responsibility of having children is teaching them the differences between right and wrong while sticking to your family values and not going along with what everyone else is doing.

If parents are allowing their tweens to have a social networking account because their tweens feel more popular, accepted and all their friends have one, then parents need to education themselves about the risks they are subjecting onto their tweens.