Your mom may want to be your pal, but should you let her see your Facebook page?

Laura Miller was recently sitting at her computer, checking the friend requests on her Facebook page, including an old family friend, the best friend of her boyfriend and an old high-school classmate. One more request surprised her – it was from her mother.

Miller promptly rejected the request. “I told her I’d have no problem helping her use it as long as she didn’t expect me to be her friend. So why is she adding me?”

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Miller’s mother is just one in the fast-growing trend of older-than-Generation-Y users on Facebook, the largest social-networking website in the world. There has been a 60 percent increase in users ages 35-54 on social networking sites in the past year alone, according to the New York Times. Females over the age of 55 now make up 1.5 million of Facebook’s users, up by 550 percent from six months ago, CNN.com recently reported. What this means is that more adults are joining Facebook, and often adding their children, and even grandchildren, as friends.

Whether Facebook users find these requests to be unwelcome or simply awkward, there is no denying that older relatives on Facebook are changing the family dynamic. Anne Collier, co-author of MySpace Unraveled: A Parent’s Guide to Teen Social Networking and Editor of NetFamilyNews.org, believes that social media is forcing us figure out how to communicate in a healthy manner in a different setting. “Social media are getting us all to think about things like presence, community, courtesy, and how to communicate and have relationships in and with a new environment,” she said.

Miller, 21, like many of the site’s original, college-aged users, refused to add her parents (her father tried to friend her also) because she believed it would allow them into a part of her life that they don’t belong in. “Facebook is an extension of my life with my friends, my life at college, and other stuff like that,” she said. “Those are things my parents are not, and really don’t have any reason to be, a direct part of.” Read the rest of this entry »