There’s a strange change that has been happening since the dawn of social media and that continues to accelerate every day. Teens are talking less to their parents and engaging more with their peers through social networks and mobile devices. The first shift, not talking to parents, has been happening for a long time but social media has made it even more prevalent. Engaging with their peers – it seems many communicate more with their fingers than their mouths nowadays.

As a natural result of this shift, the art of parenting has shifted from watching where their kids are going to monitoring their activities, friends, romantic relationships, and opinions by stalking them on Facebook. In fact, 1 our of every 2 parents joined Facebook in the first place to keep tabs on their kids. Whether they’re still doing that regularly or not isn’t as important; many parents came in with the idea that they would only monitor and then became addicted to social networking themselves. Such is the tragic path of any drug – try Facebook once and there’s a chance you’ll get hooked.

This infographic from Mashable breaks down the parenting follies as they’re associated with Facebook.

* * *

“Teen” image courtesy of Shutterstock.