The Last Kid on Earth Without FaceBook

"I am fortunate enough to have a junior high age child (she is 12 to be exact) that goes to school in a relatively affluent suburb in Houston, TX. Her life is radically different than I remember my childhood being like, but one thing remains constant and that is some form of peer pressure. Back in the day, kids used to pressure each other into passing notes in class and other ways of communicating including picking up the good ol' landline phone and calling each other up (or worse, yet physically walking to the other kid's house and knocking on the door). Well, I got my daughter a mobile phone because ""every other kid"" in school apparently has one and she was just going to be mortified if she didn't have one as well. So now she sends ridiculous texts back and forth with friends all day long wasting time and never really saying much. It doesn't really bother me because she was happy, that was until a couple of weeks later when she start getting pressured to get on FaceBook.

I tried explaining to her that we didn't have an Internet service that supported FaceBook, but she pretty much could have cared less about that (and/or maybe she figured out I wasn't being 100% honest). We actually do have a great high-speed Internet service that is always on and ready for me to work or for the kids to get their homework done. Anyway, it became clear that she was on to me and that this issue was not going to go away. The reality is that I wasn't sure she was ready for the responsbility of having a FaceBook account. In the end I opted to create a FaceBook account for her that I have the password to, I set the privacy settings, and I made her be my FaceBook friend so I could monitor her activities. Guess what? Just like with the mobile phone she uses FaceBook to send useless and silly messages to her friends but at least she is not the last kid on Earth without a FaceBook account."