Total Teen Drama Action Played Out On Facebook

Parenting a teenager is a rocky road, but with Facebook in the mix, we’re traversing boulders.

This weekend, a classmate informed her Facebook friends that my daughter is a “fake ass hoe.” Of course, I was upset to discover this about my child and I’d thank the classmate for her advice, but I’m afraid that she might misconstrue the response. Instead, I pulled out my investigative journalism techniques (interviews, covert operations, wire tapping) to get to the bottom of these allegations.

So far, I’ve avoided writing about my daughter’s dating history. First, because I prefer to imagine that she doesn’t have a dating history.  And, well, it’s personal to her and embarrassing to me.  I never thought I’d be parenting one of those girls, you know, the kind who start dating early.

I have rules, strongly stated and enforced rules.  1. No makeup in school.  2. No camisoles without a top layer at school. 3. No dating until at least 16 years of age.

My daughter has broken all those rules.

She broke the make up rule in 7th Grade, when she tried to get away with wearing clear mascara.  I noticed, there were consequences, and there was no repeat.

The camisole rule was tested this spring when the weather turned warm, and I let it slide thinking that so near the end of middle school it wasn’t worth fighting.  In retrospect, I should’ve put a stop to it right away.  I suspect her attire may have had a lot to do with boys thinking she is a “kissing girl.”  I’m sure her behavior didn’t help.

I’m not sure when the dating started.  I’m not even sure that you can call it dating when she never spent any time with these boys outside of school. 

Sometime in late winter or early spring, I noticed that she changed her Facebook status to “In a Relationship” but I figured it was an inside joke, much like listing her friends as family members.  The boy she selected is shorter and younger, so I just didn’t think she meant it.

Well, she did.  Later on, I discovered that on a school field trip, she French Kissed that boy while sitting on a bus seat directly in front of her Social Studies teacher.  Also, she found opportunities to kiss this boy while in school. As you can imagine, I was just thrilled to hear this from my daughter.

Of course, I threw a fit.  She didn’t think there was anything wrong with this behavior, and I couldn’t convince her otherwise.  She was also under the impression that other moms would think this was perfectly acceptable behavior. I was able to recruit other moms to tell her what they really thought, but apparently she wasn’t convinced.

A few weeks later, that young man broke up with her, and I breathed a sigh of relief that we were done with this saga.

She was just getting started.  Again, she posted on Facebook that she was in a relationship with another boy, a fun-loving kid who is even younger and shorter than the previous boyfriend.  This is a boy that she had jokingly listed as her husband earlier in the year, so I thought she was joking again.

It was no joke, and at a graduation party last weekend, she kissed this boy.  Not only that, another boy kissed her as well, AT THE SAME PARTY! Oy!

I’m still trying to process this whole situation.  How could she be so casual about kissing?  Why is she dating boys who are younger than she?  And what is this tempest in a teapot on Facebook?

I attribute the casual attitude to her immaturity and media messages.  There doesn’t seem to be a single teen movie that doesn’t feature a very cavalier attitude toward teen sex.  In her unformed mind, kissing seems like no big deal by comparison. Also, I shudder to think that this kissing phase is more fashion statement, than it is a real and true emotional development as described in Playing at Sexy:

Sexual entitlement, according to Deborah Tolman, a professor at Hunter College and author of “Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality,” has instead become the latest performance, something girls act out rather than experience. “By the time they are teenagers,” she said, “the girls I talk to respond to questions about how their bodies feel — questions about sexuality or desire — by talking about how their bodies look. They will say something like, ‘I felt like I looked good.’ Looking good is not a feeling.”

Maybe she is trying to go through the motions of what she thinks teens are supposed to be doing.  And dating younger boys is probably easier than her peers since her maturity level is on par with these kids.  Although I don’t get why such young, immature kids would even want to kiss.  They’re still trading Silly Bandz and silly jokes, so why do they have to trade saliva too?

Total Drama Action On Facebook

When I read her classmate’s Facebook post, I asked my daughter about the accusation.  Teen Daughter replied that the classmate was just being mean for no reason, and that she and her friends had blocked and reported her on Facebook.

I didn’t buy the “no reason” excuse, especially after reading the FB conversations alluding to an incident at the party (but no details.)  Teen Daughter tried to get me to believe that the incident was just her hugging a friend who was not her boyfriend, and I was gullible enough to believe her.

I sent her to bed with a hug, fully intending to drop the whole thing.  I even posted a FB reply to one of her friends who demanded to know why Teen Daughter wasn’t responding, letting her know that she had gone to bed and would be busy the next day studying for Regents exams. After that, I didn’t see anything new posted on her FB wall.  End of story, right?

A little while later, I went in to check on Teen Daughter, thinking to stroke her hair and give her a kiss.  Just a little late night reassurance that I love her, no matter what.  Instead, I found her texting her friend and her boyfriend via Facebook Chat.  That’s when I got the full scoop, and way more detail than I wanted, on all the kissing that took place at the graduation party.

What have we learned from this experience?

I’m glad that I befriended some of my daughter’s friends on Facebook, otherwise I wouldn’t have known about these brewing issues. It’s prompted my husband and I to have another frank conversation with my daughter and to raise the stakes.

Previously, when we had discussed dating and kissing, Teen Daughter sugar coated her accounts. Seeing the chat threads on Facebook, in all their unvarnished glory, was a different animal altogether.

As a result, my husband initiated phone calls to the parents of the two boys who participated in the kissing, not to accuse them, but to apologize for our daughter’s behavior.  Partly, this was so that the parents would know what’s going on with their children.  However, this also sends a clear message to our daughter that we do not condone these actions.  (Teen Selective Hearing – We had told her that she shouldn’t be kissing boys or dating yet after the first incident, but she actually told us that we never said so.)

We also told her to call her “boyfriend” to tell him that she can’t be in a relationship as she is too young to date.

Additionally, we’re giving Teen Daughter a break from social media.  We told her that she is welcome to call her friends on the phone, but she needs a little time to reflect. What I didn’t tell her is that I’m concerned about the feedback that is getting from friends.  At least one of her friends is urging her to pursue being in a relationship, to the extent that they are encouraging her to lie about breaking up.

It’s as if they are living vicariously through Teen Daughter’s experiences, creating a drama for their amusement and entertainment.

Meanwhile, the “boyfriend” has changed his Facebook relationship status to: “It’s complicated.”  I’d say that pretty much sums up our teen parenting relationship too.