Facebook accounts for kids

At what age do you think it's appropriate for a child / teenager to have a Facebook account, MSN account, Yahoo account?

I know this has been discussed before, not on this forum but I'm curious to hear everyone's opinion on this issue.

My youngest son (11 years old) came home from visitation with his dad. I found out from my youngest son that over the weekend that my ex created him a FB account. Wasn't happy about it but kept an open mind. figured it was going to contain kids his age, in particular friends from school to keep in touch with over the summer. With that I would have had no problems with him having a FB account that I can supervise.

I got his email account that was created for him along with the password so that I could go into FB and check to see the content being posted on his wall. I log in, read his wall and find that majority of the people on his FB account are adults (assuming friends of the ex's because there is a security lock on the account that only friends can see), talking about some things that are adult content and adult language, there are only two kids that posted something on his wall. One was my ex's niece, and the other was some kid I have no clue who he is, doesn't even attend my son's school.

So you can imagine how pissed I was at what I had read, I informed my son that I was going to delete his FB account, and the reason why I was doing it in case my dumb ass ex asks him why it was deleted and who deleted it. It will take FB 14 days to delete it, provided nobody logs in with his account on FB. My son will be with me for the next two weeks, then off to camp for a week, so the only way the deletion of the account can be canceled / reactivated is if my ex logs in to his account (as he has the user name and password to log in too).

Yes, I also took screen captures of the content posted on there as proof showing it was on my son's account.

Grrrrr!!!

Fleas jr has one, but only to play the diner game with her mom, no friends except her.

Both my kids have one.. well Oldest (13) Had one and lost it from having girls send him dirty pics hes not allowed his back but youngest (12) has one real one and a bunch of fake ones as hes not allowed adding anyone but family so his fake accounts are for neighbours and game gifts which is all he uses his for.

All emails and passwords are kept on the fridge.

My sisters kids all have one but again only family members are allowed to be added and they are just used for games.

Fleas, something like that is fine. The games on there are relaxing and fun for the kids to play. I was hoping that Zynga would in a way move their games from FB onto their own site.

change the PW so your ex can't log back in. :lol:

My 13 yr old and 17 yr old have FB accounts. My 3 and 4 yr olds don't.

ELSIETHECOW wrote:

change the PW so your ex can't log back in. :lol:

I was going to say the same thing.

You can block all the people you don't want on it, just leave the ones you think are ok. My grandaughter has one as do most of her friends (11)

That I've had time to sleep on it and think it over this morning, I'm going to recreate him another FB account with a password and email address that only he and I have access to. One that can have family and his school friends on (with a verbal warning to the ex to clean up his language on his wall if he wants to be added on as his friend). I didn't think about changing the password until after I had submitted a request to FB to delete the account. If I log in before the 14 days, there's a note stating that it will cancel the request to delete the account. If it's still there after 14 days, then I'll change the password, and send an email to FB a request to delete it. Instead of the other delete request route. The ex doesn't know that I am having the account deleted, he won't know until the 14 days when it's not on FB any more.