A warning to all the kids, no matter what their age, on Facebook: your parents, your aunts and uncles and even your grandparents are checking your stuff out! They read your status updates, look at your photos and sometimes do a little snooping on your friends. According to several new studies, some parents are employing stealth, sometimes in the form of third party agencies to handle the spying missions while others are very upfront about the amount of access they will expect to have for their child's life. Some parents even make certain demands, including being immediately friended and having the password to the account as a prerequisite for Facebook access.

Those moves, while loudly decried as an invasion of privacy by the younger generation, are actually necessary according to Linda Fogg-Philips, an author based in Las Vegas. Fogg-Philips also gives lectures on Facebook and families as well as running seminars on the topic. Young brains are often not developed, according to Fogg-Philips, and don't think of things like long term consequences of their words or actions.

Parents often turn to services like Safety Web which will provide monitoring of all social networks as well as text messages and then provide a report on the activity for a monthly fee.

In one study related to social media, just over ten percent of parents admitted that they had only joined Facebook to spy on their children while another 55% of them said that they often use Facebook to check up on their kids in one way or another. In another study, this one based in Great Britain, nearly a quarter of the parents surveyed said that they considered Facebook to be the only way they could keep track of their children.

A study that looked at over two hundred college students found that a third of them had either posted a photo or a status that made some mention of alcohol. More than half of the students in that group were also found to be at a higher risk for alcohol dependence and abuse than the others.

According to Don Damsteegt, a Psychiatrist with the Family Psychology Association in Cedar Rapids as well as the Public Education Community Chairman for the Iowa Psychology Association, spying on your kids on their Facebook page is not the demon that the kids might portray it as. Instead, it is the lack of parental involvement in the lives of this generation that may be a serious risk factor for a number of behavioral problems.