Are you friends with your teenagers on their instagram/snapchat etc?

[Puygo]

Just thought I would gauge what is normal. I am not but was thinking maybe others are?

Yes I can see where they are on Snapchat too with their live location

No, I'm not interested in that part of their lives. They're older teens though, so I don't want to know where they are all the time.

I hope I won't be. I don't like the idea of tracking but we'll see, my two are only 10 and 12 (I don't track them walking home from school but that's the only time they are 'out' without me)

No, because it would be weird.

Yes to Instagram and BeReal. No to anything else like Snapchat.

They put the nice sanitised mum friendly stuff on Insta and leave anything else for Snapchat.

Siblings are all on each others though.

my eldest was pretty wayward and when he was 15 I did 6 months of MST (multi systemic therapy) at the behest of the youth offending team and they told me to friend all his online friends and make sure everyone knew who my son’s mum was! He’s in his 20s and independent now so no longer really relevant.

My DD has a cellular Apple Watch instead of a smart phone, no camera, no social media, just calls, texts, music, maps etc. I’m aiming to keep her off all social media until she’s 15-16 at least (quite a few parents of her classmates are also aiming for this, so she’s not the only one. At least a 3rd of her year 7 cohort are smartphone free).

Yes, though he's nearly 16 and I don't use any of it to 'monitor' him any more, partly because I don't need to, and partly because he's changed his SM use by himself, removing random 'friends' and deleting a lot of stuff lately. When he started using SM when he was 11/12 I did follow him on everything as a condition of having it.

A lot have teens have more than 1 Instagram/Snapchat. One for mum and dad to see, and their real one...

Thanks for these replies. It hadn’t occurred to me for some reason. But something someone said made me wonder if it’s something all parents do

DC1 suggested we follow each other in insta, because she likes to steal my photos that way. But all the juicy stuff goes down on Discord so I still know nothing that I wouldn't know if I didn't follow her.

Oh what is discord?

Yes to Insta but not TikTok, and I don't have Snap.

Not really to monitor though, and I'm absolutely banned from commenting. All to embarassing having me as your number 1 fan apparently.

Discord is kind of a cross between old fashioned anonymous topic forums (like Mumsnet) and whatsapp style messaging.

It was popularised by gamers due to the voice group chat feature (so you can chat to the team of strangers you are playing video games with).

It’s had quite a lot of issues with underage sexual content but the company are trying to take action over it: https://discord.com/safety/child-safety-policy-explainer

There is a Facebook group for parents called ‘Parenting in a Tech World’ that is really useful for understanding what current teens are up to online, but it’s quite America-centric in terms of product recommendations, so U.K. parents need to sift through/scroll past that.

Yes. He added me. We like to send each other stuff. We're a pretty nerdy mother and son duo. Lol