http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030801034_3.html
This article was written in 2008, so its a few years old, but it took one of the first looks at the outrage Facebook users had when their parents started to use Facebook and tried to add them as a friend. The title of the the article even put the word friend in quotation meaning to emphasize that Facebook friends aren't really friends based on the reaction kids had to being added by their folks. Almost the entire article is about cases of kids whining and freaking out about getting a friend request. I do not think things are any different now in 2015 than how they were 10 years ago, but I will clarify. Parents and their children will always have an issue with kids wanting space and parents wanting to keep an eye on them to keep them safe. However 10 years ago when Facebook opened up to the public it simply gave the issue a means to be expressed other than directly face to face. The issue between parent child relationships, and I could very well be unaware of it in the high school setting, but now it does not seem that parents adding their kids on FB is as big of a deal as it was back in 2008. Point being Facebook was simply a tool to express relational issues, the only thing that shifts is which relationship is currently in the spot light.
I think that you are completely right about the parents and children always wanting space. It seems to me that it is a lot more common for kids to have their parents as friends on Facebook than it was a few years ago. I think that some kids (not all) are becoming more conscious of what they put on Facebook, so having their parents as friends is not such a big issue.
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