My Mom's on Facebook -- Relationships Week 12

In this rather entertaining comedic song, we come across a relatively new development in familial relationships: parents and facebook (or any other social networking site).

Now, I’m not sure how many of you interact with your parents on facebook, or how much you share with them about the things you do when you’re not studying hard at school, but I do know that over the years I’ve discovered there are a lot of things that MY parents are better off NOT knowing. Don’t get me wrong, my parents are VERY cool, and VERY understanding, but there are some behaviors, like drinking and sex, that early in college I discovered were things that my parents didn’t need to know about.

The video above reinforces this discourse—that parents and children are better off not sharing too much of their lives. In fact, this video reproduces some very important discourses about how parents and their children should interact. This video reminds us that there should be limitations surrounding what parents and children know about one another and how “involved” they are in each others’ lives. “Children,” this discourse says, need boundaries with their parents; otherwise, they can’t really be themselves, which of course suggests that children are their “true” selves when they aren’t with their parents. Any chance this discourse facilitates boundaries in the relationships between parents and children?

As we see in the video, this discourse seems to be particularly prominent for mothers and their children. For while it is safe to assume that many fathers wouldn’t react well to seeing their sons (and CERTAINLY their daughters) “debauchery” on facebook, this video promotes the dominant discourse that it is moms as parents who are more likely to be nosy, more likely to try and “connect” with their children, and more likely to be upset by their behavior.

What I find particularly interesting about this video, though, is the way it presents discourses about how relationships between children and parents are changing as a result of social networking sites like facebook. This discourse, like so many others about the internet, reminds us that parents should be fearful/suspicious/on top of their children’s social networking, and reminds us that when “children” are being asked by mom or dad to be a “friend” on facebook—and likewise when they have to deal with the process of deciding whether to “confirm” or “ignore” them—they are going to feel uncomfortable and awkward. This video employs discourses which teach us that “confirming” mom might lead to “destroying all my [our] privacy,” and that social networking sites are going to be a place of tension between parents and their children. Parents need to "watch out" for what their kids are doing on the internet, and "kids" need to watch out for their parents getting too close and too involved with their lives.