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When mom wants to be friend [China Daily: Hong Kong Edition]
[September 29, 2014]

When mom wants to be friend [China Daily: Hong Kong Edition]


(China Daily: Hong Kong Edition Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) It's become an artifact of present-day culture that young people are fleeing some of the popular social networking sites. The reason? Their parents keep wanting to become 'friends', so they can observe what their kids are up to. Wang Yuke reports 'I was thrilled to be the first friend of my girls on Facebook, Wechat, Whatsapp and Instagram", says Jody Cheung, a mother of two. "Then it dawned on me one day that they were blocking me, so that sometimes they wouldn't even share their status messages with me." Such are the pains of parents who insist on invading their kids' privacy by inviting themselves as "friends" on their kids' social network pages.



A survey of 1,192 parents and their offspring by the Hong Kong Research Association in August showed that 40 percent of young people refused to accept their parents as "friends" on their social networks.

Of those who were willing to let their parents in, 38 percent said they set online barriers - so parents were simply blocked from some of the young people's most private thoughts.


Cheung's thing was befriending her children, her children's friends, their classmates and their classmates' parents. She thought it was a great way to be on top of what her two girls were doing at school.

Cheung's eldest daughter Chloe caught her mom snooping on her phone. As Cheung was scrutinizing everything on Chloe's social networks, Chloe felt violated. She had no privacy, so she put a security code on her phone and cut her mother out.

Parents may think they are "taking a healthy interest" or giving kids effective supervision but Yeung Chi-bun, an accredited mediator for Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups (HKFYG), says parents may be damaging their relationships with their kids.

Parents, Yeung says, have to see through their own games when they make haste to become their children's "friends" on social networks. "Parents need to ask themselves 'what's my starting point, spying or bonding?'" If parents want to bond with their kids, they should stop meddling in the kids' social lives, he insists.

Chloe reached puberty and naturally, got interested in boys. Some parents treat that very normal passage into adolescence as if it is their worst nightmare. It's still a vulnerable time for teenagers, but misguided parenting and over the top restrictions on freedoms makes things worse.

Cheung made a careful appraisal of her feelings about Chloe's reaching adolescence and then made an appointment with a counselor.

"Chloe candidly told me there was a rumor spreading in her class that she and a boy were in a relationship. She confessed that the boy shared his wifi passwords with her and nobody else. But she denied any bond with him." Cheung, nevertheless, was anxious. She sensed a spark between her daughter and the boy. But she made up her mind not to spy. She took the advice of her psychologist.

"I struck up conversations with her about the boy. I asked her to share their photos. I gave her gentle feedbacks: 'That's so nice.' 'Handsome boy'".

Yeung thinks Cheung took the right approach. "Face-to-face communication is the most straightforward way to get through to children. It helps to cement trust and puts parents and children on an equal footing." Not every parent gets it.

Chin Fung, a family psychologist, talks about his client's story to illuminate the poison of hegemonic parenting. Johnny Ng was the 15 year-old only son of an affluent family burdened by toxic family relationships.

The teenager had problems of his own, like the constantly runny nose and the frequent trips to the bathroom. His mother noticed and she knew these were signs of ketamine abuse. Ketamine is a horse tranquilizer, popular as a recreational drug.

Ng's parents surreptitiously set up a logger in his computer, so they could read every stroke he entered on his laptop's keyboard. The relationship between parents and child turned into a sort of cold war.

Ignored online etiquette Ng's father set up a Facebook account - posing as a pretty girl to lure the boy into an online relationship.

Ng opened his heart to his online "soul mate" and talked about his heartbreak over his parents and what all they seemed to care about was whether he got good grades.

"I've seen many parents keep exploiting feel-good factors from their kids, but they seldom bring out happy outcomes. They keep asking for output yet never give any input." Chin explained, "it's like you keep drawing money from your bank account until your credit card balance reaches its breaking point." Chin noted the parents' marriage was on shaky ground. "Without confronting it head on, they transfer their anger to their son as a way of relieving their own frustration." Chin said, "The boy became the parents' scapegoat." A suggestion for parents on their Facebook etiquettes by Huffington Post was "be exclusive with your likes and comments". It said that by refraining from making frequent comments, children would not fear parents are always lurking on their social life.

Ling Yuen-kwan, another mediator of the HKFYG, agreed and added, "the more restrictions parents impose, the more their children are likely to rebel." A European Union-funded study on social media found that as parents sign up to Facebook, their children retreat from Facebook and migrate to other social networks such as Snapchat and Twitter. While parents used to worry about their children joining Facebook, now the kids are saying their parents are insisting they stay on Facebook and post the details of their lives. It may be a new era, where Facebook is dominated by teenagers, while true adolescents slip away.

Contact the writer at [email protected] (HK Edition 09/22/2014 page7) (c) 2014 China Daily Information Company. All Rights Reserved. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).

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