A teen has sued his mother for harassment after she logged into his Facebook account and changed content. He also claims she’s made "slanderous" comments about him in Facebook as well. It’s important to note that this 16-year-old lives with his grandmother and not his mother, and that he appears to be old enough to drive in his home state of Arkansas.

His mother says,

"You’re within your legal rights to monitor your child and to have a conversation with your child on Facebook whether it’s his account, or your account or whoever’s account."

There are a lot of unanswered questions in spite of many reports about this story. What did the teen feel was "slanderous"? Does the mother have custodial rights? Where was the grandmother in all of this hubbub — is she out of touch with technology? What are the state’s laws regarding age of independence? And what exactly did the state’s prosecutors see which encouraged them to take up the case?

I talked this morning with my own 16-year-old about this situation; how would she feel if I’d "hacked" her Facebook page and changed content or wrote on her page? She was puzzled; she said she couldn’t imagine me changing anything on her page let alone logging into her site.

But there’s a reason for this: my kid’s been coached since she was old enough to hold a mouse and bang on a keyboard that protecting one’s privacy is paramount on the internet. We didn’t allow private email accounts until she was a teen in middle school, and instant messaging was occasionally supervised. She was only allowed to open a Facebook page after a year’s worth of coaching about privacy controls and online bullying along with sharing lots of examples online; we also talked frequently about the nature of the internet. Once published, content is out there forever, and anything she said could be misconstrued and used against her. And I wouldn’t be able to protect her from the consequences once she began to use social media. She’d be taking a very big step toward her own independence without her mom holding her hand.

In spite of all the precautions and coaching, kids will still blow off parents and ignore pointed warnings. It was a mixed blessing that within 24 hours of creating her Facebook page, my kid was harassed unmercifully by a so-called friend — someone she thought was a friend in real life — to the point where she had to unfriend and block other communications from them. I couldn’t have made my case any better about the dangers of social media if I’d paid the obnoxious bully to do it for me.

Since then we’ve had no further drama with social media. There’s the occasional outburst of excessive texting by someone in her circle, or someone else becoming non-responsive, but these temporary situations generally mirror something else going on in the face-to-face world. The non-responsive person might have a new boyfriend/girlfriend, for example, and is hyper-focused on that new relationship instead of their friends. This happens in the unwired world as well as in the internet-mediated world, so not a surprise.

It still hurts to see your kid dealing with some very ugly truths, even after you’ve coached them about the ways of the world. It’s one thing to explain that some people are only fair-weather friends and what that means, but quite another to see it played out in the form of rabid bullying online. There’s only so much we can do as parents. At some point our kids are going to have to learn the hard way, just as we did.

I’m torn about the Arkansas mother in this case; I don’t know all the details and can’t say whether the mother was right to be concerned to the point where she felt she had to intervene. What little I’ve read so far, though, tells me that her teen didn’t receive adequate coaching about his personal information or the way social media and the internet work.

Much more importantly, she lost parental influence her son years ago if he actually drove 95 miles an hour because of anger and frustration over a girl, as he reportedly wrote in his Facebook page. His privacy might have been breached and his mom might have abused his confidence, but this kid is out of control and a danger to himself and to others in real life. This didn’t happen overnight, or because he’s writing about it on a Facebook page.

And authorities in Arkansas may have their priorities a little skewed if they missed the forest for the trees in this case. Doesn’t it seem odd there is no concern reported on the part of state prosecutors that a 16-year-old boy who lived with a grandparent may have been driving at dangerously high speeds?

What about you — what do you think about this case? Share your two cents in comments.