Sometimes, when I’m reminiscing with my mother about my teenage years and I tell her things she and my father had no clue about, I can see her turning quite pale. Nothing very extraordinary mind you: hitchhiking rather than taking the bus to get back home in time for curfew, or telling her I would be with girlfriends when I would actually be dating a boy, you know, the usual teenage white lies. Although I was never into it myself, I did have friends who were smoking pot, or popping pills with Coca Cola to get high and she is always shocked that she never knew anything about all this. As I always point out to her, however, what could she have possibly done, short of locking me up in my room and forbidding me to ever go out, ever again? Teenagers push the boundaries because that is what they are supposed to do during those rebellion years; they will strike up friendships with all sorts of different people until they learn to be more selective, and they will be subjected to peer pressure – it is all a part of growing up.

Even though many decades have passed, and I’ve emerged on this side of adulthood relatively unscathed (because frankly, compared to a lot of my friends, I was quite “good”), my mother still finds the knowledge of my teenage escapades difficult to handle. So I can only imagine what life would have been like if Facebook had been around in the mid-1970s, and my mother sent me a ‘friend’ request, and I had accepted. Would I have wanted her to eavesdrop on all my conversations with my friends, be privy to all our plans and spy on all my photos? I compare Facebook to a private diary, and having your parents as your ‘friends’ is equivalent to you leaving your diary lying around where they can openly read it.

Why would any teenager want that kind of intrusion? Why would you want your parents to post mortifying remarks in reaction to your silly banter?

I sympathise with parents, of course, who are using Facebook as a way of knowing what their adolescent children are up to because they are afraid they will fall in with a bad crowd, or end up dating a completely unsuitable boy/girl. They want to protect them and cushion them from negative influences and perhaps intervene when they see things going wrong, before it is much too late. There is only so much you can do, however, without stifling children and stunting their maturity. The role of parents is to do the best they can, keep their fingers crossed that their countless lectures have seeped in, and pray for the best.

Let’s not forget, after all, that our own parents were even more over-protective. Today’s parents often tell me that raising children nowadays is in no way comparable to their own youth, but maybe they should ask their own parents what it was like for them. Sometimes I think we forget that each generation views the antics of the next one with mounting alarm and with their stomach tied up in knots with anxiety.

For my father, a girl staying out until midnight was unthinkable (good girls, in his view, were home by 10pm maximum), but we argued with him relentlessly to have our curfew extended each year and eventually we wore him down through sheer persistence, although he never stopped objecting. Even when we reached our 20s he continued to be protective. In the world he grew up in, young women simply did not go to Gozo or go abroad with their boyfriend or, what was even worse, have sex before they were married. On these issues his foot was firmly down, and he was appalled beyond words that his own two daughters even dared to question what the big deal was.

Strict parents were the norm for my generation. Why do you think so many women who are now approaching 50 were married by the time they were 22? It was partly because the majority of women did not think in terms of having a career back then, but another reason is because they wanted to escape from the claustrophobic confines of rigid parental control. Marriage gave them a measure of freedom to stay out late, which they could never have hoped to have as long as they lived at home, and let’s face it, as respectable married women, it also “allowed” them to be sexually active without having to resort to furtive groping in the back seat of a parked car.

Until the babies came, of course, and then it was back to the home front. In fact, it is no wonder that so many women over 40 yearn to go out and let loose once the kids get older, because their window of opportunity for having fun was very small when they were young.

With each generation you will have kids yearning to break away from the rules their parents continuously try to enforce. If you look back through time, it has always been like this. But there are, and should be, boundaries between the teenage and adult world, because that is the natural order of things. And this is where I think parents have to be wise when it comes to Facebook. Yes, go ahead and use Facebook for your own social networks with people your age, but steer away from adding your children as friends, or what is worse, their friends as your friends. Allow your kids to have their own ‘world’ where they are free to talk and express themselves without an adult peering over their shoulder. After all, would you invite yourself to your teenage daughter’s sleepover, and hang out with her and her friends as they gossip about boys and try on make-up? If the thought of that scenario sounds ridiculous, well that is the equivalent of being one of her Facebook friends.

My suggestion is to allow your children to have their Facebook privacy, while naturally, still keeping an eye on how they are behaving in real life where it is your duty to give them proper guidance.

As much as it galls us to accept it, the fact is that teenagers will always keep secrets from their parents. Of course it is sad to realise that the child who used to snuggle up and tell you everything that happened during the day, now closes the door to their bedroom and shuts you out of their life. But before you become too upset, try and remember how you treated your own parents at that age. Where you confiding and open about everything, or did you keep certain things to yourself? “But I wanted my relationship with my own son/daughter to be different”, parents always say. “My parents were old-fashioned, I’m much more open-minded. I just wanted to be their friend.”

I know it is heartbreaking to hear this, but no matter how you perceive yourself, to them you are their mother/father, and I’m sorry you cannot be their friend, whether in real life or on Facebook.

Friendship will only come later, usually when they move out and establish their own identity and independence, when they will come over and visit you and tell you all the things they used to get up to as they reminisce about their teenage years.

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