If You’re Not Completely Stalking Your Kids’ Social Media, You Need To. And This Story Is A Perfect Example Of Why.

Last week’s episode of the Mock and Daisy Common Sense Cast was about social media impact on our kids, and the trend for some teens to have “Finsta” accounts. If you missed that episode, you can catch it right here.

In response to that episode, we received a message from a woman who had a really fascinating (and scary) story to tell, which further drives our point home.  DO NOT assume that your child isn’t using some of these platforms, or that your child is using them innocently.  Stalk your kids’ phones.  Check them regularly – look at their texts, their DMs on social media accounts, their search histories – all of it.

The author of this message asked that we keep it anonymous.

She wrote:

Hey chicks, I just read your finstagram blog and listened to your podcast about it too. I figured I should let you know about my own experience as a teenager.

It doesn’t even take instagram, Facebook, twitter, or even tiktok for kids to be sucked down a terrible road right under their parents noses. I remember myself 16 years ago being allowed to have IM privileges on the family computer right in the living room so you could have zero privacy, but I still managed to get involved with somebody 11+ years my senior.

It started innocently enough, a friend from church camp got on the same platform. My parents saw no harm. She and I chatted for some time about family and school; until she invited a guy she knew “from school” into a group message.

After about a month of group chatting, where I became comfortable and considered him a friend as well, he requested private chat. What’s the harm? I was in a public, high trafficked area of the house. No way I could get into anything, right? Majorly wrong. He started to get increasingly intimate and demanding, we call it grooming now. I even chatted like that with my parents 5 feet away and none the wiser.

6 months roll by, and it’s summer vacation. My so-called friend who set up the contact with the guy asked my parents if I could stay for a couple nights. They saw no harm, we met at church camp, so she was fine even though they only met her at the goodbye ceremony and didn’t know her parents.

Well, first night, she takes me to his place because he wanted her to. I was very stupid and followed along, anxious to actually meet this guy who I’ve been chatting with, but never met. All this time, I thought he was 16. I was wrong, horrifically wrong in fact.

We arrived to his place, and she introduced us. I was frozen in shock at seeing who I thought was a 16 year old boy turning out to be a 26 year old man! She walked in, dragging me with her and saying “she’s just shy.” Not even 5 minutes later, she abandoned me with him! Thankfully, the worst thing that happened was he groped me, but I couldn’t bolt fast enough away. I didn’t have a cell phone of my own yet, because I was yet to be 16, or have a job, and that were the rules in the house.

As soon as I got to her house, I told her parents I felt sick and I needed to go home. They gave me their phone to call my parents, which I’m not sure I have ever dialed a number so quickly. I never spoke about this to anybody, for the shame I felt was too great. All I did was erase her number, delete my IM, and deal with it silently.

What my whole story can be summed up as: don’t trust your kids with anything electronic. They can be sitting a few feet from you and doing dangerous things. Keep their phones at night and go through everything daily. Know their friends and their friend’s parents before letting them go anywhere alone with then. I could have ended up dead, sold as a sex slave, or anywhere in between all because my parents trusted me with something I didn’t have enough maturity to handle.

Horrifying, isn’t it?  I’m not sure (and perhaps she’ll write again to clarify) how she got out of that guy’s house and back to her friend’s house, but I suppose it doesn’t really even matter.  She got out, and that’s what’s important.  She’s able to tell the story now, and hopefully the story encourages parents to get a little more rabid about monitoring their kids’ activity on social media.

I’m a total hawk about it with my 14 year old, and thankfully it’s not something that causes much argument.  He knows that his phone really belongs to us and that he’s just using it because we let him, there are no apps on it that we don’t have the password to, etc. And he also knows that the reason I’m a hawk is because I love him and care about his safety, NOT because I don’t trust him.  I trust him plenty – I just don’t trust the rest of the world, and the message above that we received is a perfect example of why.

Speaking of “Finsta” – since that’s a word Daisy and I just learned last week – we thought that for this week’s podcast, we’d learn #ALLTHEWORDS that the kids are saying these days.  How many have you heard? How many do you use?

Take a listen – and report back!

Listen to “Ep. 26: This Podcast is LIT AF” on Spreaker.