Facebook to lift its ban on users under 13: your thoughts?

purpleroses I myself am a fc and I can assure you parents with children as young a 7 will try and contact the children any way they can we have had parents try and sneak mobiles to the children in contact

Fb is dangerous beause the foster carer then has to add herself to monitor the fc then the bio parent then has acesss to the foster carer I have know parents to work out what school a child attends from the school uniform or work out were somone lives from the comments and pictures

Many of the parents are very desprate and make poor desisions (hence their chikdren being in care )

Also grooming starts at a young age chidren may not be actally abused until late teens but the brain washing starts long before

It's a totally mad idea. The bullying situation is out of hand already or so it seems. I can see the writing on the wall for Facebook. It won't even exist in five years. But we shall see. I expect a lot of under 13's are on it already. So they will just try and attract younger and younger people.

Mrbojangles - surely the sort of things your talking about are done by late teens (or older!) not kids under 13. Same with the sex gang in Rochdale - the girls were over 13 (and groomed on the streets not FB if I recall correctly?)

Gymbob parents seemly and young people are not aware that collages and unis now goggle candidates also every boss worth his or her salt do also

Fb profiles can be used as evidence in court

And a funny picture of you doing moon or slagging some girl off when your 16 migh seem funny but not so clever when your 18 and want to get in to Oxford

morethanpotatoprints if a child say had been groomed by their father say and was placed in foster carer for their own saftey , said father or groomer may take the chance t re start the grooming over face book to try to "explain away" the abuse cast ss and foster carer in the evil role and in some cases parents coarece their bio children to run away or even

Give scripts to children to evoke against foster carers in the hope they will get their child back

It's the same reason bio parents are nth allowed to give their children mobile phones or get their children to talk to people over the phone during contact.

Even though these people are the childrens parents they are still the abuser and the child their victim I know of no other circumstances were it would be considered ok for a abuser to keep in contact with their victim

That's just one reason why the other is as we saw from the sex gang up north chikdren in care are vurable to making inaprorate connections with people
It other words their more likey to be swept up by the not so nice elements of society.

I know morethanpotatoprints when I was a child we didn't even have a house phone for years, we used the big red call box in the next street. Life was so much simpler then - the peer pressure today is horrendous .

Personally, I can't understand why anyone would want to put their lives in the public domain like that (fb I mean). I understand employers now search fb for anything derogatory about their potential employees - if I posted something when I was young and stupid, it would still be there in 20 years time wouldn't it

Totally agree with maryz-My DD joined at 12 and was completely supervised,at the 'official' age I may have felt less of a personal responsibility because it is allowed

Gymbob.
Sorry about my naivity, I understand now and was being a bit thick. I can see how difficult this would be for children and parents in your position. I know nothing of the system as it was so much different years ago. If its any consolation I think self respecting parents who monitor their childrens internet activity would not allow fb anyway. As I said my dd won't be on fb at all.

funnily enough we just got a letter from my sons infant school complaining about cyber bullying and bad mouthing the school. I do not agree with under 13's using the site but then again might be good to keep an eye on their parents : )

Landrover- I agree, it can lead to kids being over boundaries.

I am not trying to wind anybody up by the way, so please dont get cross, but it is a difficult argument to have with any child if "some " rules can be broken?

They already use it. I had an invitation today from my nine year old nephew. I don't agree with it at all but it is happening

I monitor dd's pms. I screen her emails, and her facebook account. Since pms get emailed, and I see all her emails, nothing on there is private. I will let her have more privacy when she is a bit older, but at 11 I want to keep an eye on it for now. She doesn't mind at all. She is more private with her SMS, but at least that is safer than online.

That train of thought works equally well with smoking and drinking...however I thought we were talking about pre teens

Mmmm, so are we going to let our children drive cars before 17, steal from shops etc? Where is the line drawn?

How do you supervise a child who doesn't know what risks fb presents to them, soupy? Your child may have really high security settings but their friends may not. Adoptive/foster parents are not allowed to change their child's birth name so if they have a very unusual name, it would be horribly easy to track them down if you were so inclined.

morethanpotatoprints - unlike many years ago, many children who are adopted nowadays are not given up freely by their parents but are taken away because they are at serious risk of abuse.

Linking underage facebook to underage sex is a interesting angle to take. I feel the same about both- I'd rather they did neither but if they were going to, I'd want it to be safe and protected and so be the kind of parent who has open dialogue with my kids.

soup what about the private messages that can be sent on fb. Can you monitor those - asking as I don't actually know, just assuming that pm's are actually private?

Or are we the sort of parents who, knowing the child is going to do it anyway, think it better that they do so in a supervised and safe environment? Unlike those with their heads in the sand who say "my child is never going to ..." whilst their child goes off and does it unsupervised and without any precautions.

morethanpotatoprints my fc is not allowed contact with one particular member of her birth family for her own safety - some of the indepth reasons she is not aware of and it is inappropriate to tell her at the moment. She would not understand, and wouldn't understand the implications, she doesn't know the half of it.

The other members of her birth family have supervised contact with her, In other words a social worker will sit in on contact visits and monitor what is said etc. They have to be careful that inappropriate information isn't disclosed, as it has been in the past.

How on earth can we be sure she is safe if she can get onto fb and contact the people that have damaged her. Fb is a total nightmare for social workers.

I dont understand why parents are happily letting their children break the rules because "they are going to do it anyway!" Are these the same parents that are happy for their children to have sex under 16 "because they are going to do it anyway!"
Children should surely abide by the rules? As a parent it is up to us to teach them that!

It would depend on the reason for the fostering/adoption. If the birth families are a potential risk to the child, the child needs to stay "hidden" so to speak.

I may be silly but why wouldn't adopted/foster children be able to have accounts. I don't agree with fb under 16 let alone 13 and my dd won't be having one. But as an adopted person I would like to understand why not? Maybe I'm missing the vital reason.

13 is really the youngest age you can possibly have those kind of very difficult conversations with children I think. And you shouldn't have to feel pushed into it because 'everyone else in my class has fb' reasons. But that is exactly what many foster and adoptive parents will have to do in order to explain why their children can't have an account.

Yes DowagersHump - we also discovered that fc had posted a video of herself on youtube, and for the same reasons we had to get it removed. One birth family member is a particular potential risk. She doesn't even know the full reasons as to why we can't allow her and pictures of her to be on the internet. Like you say even explaining the implications has it's own problems especially when to her the birth family have done no wrong....tricky - well it's going to be