Been a few days since your teenage son or daughter responded to your request to be friends on Facebook?

Whether that query gets accepted with a ”sure, duh” or becomes a point of contention depends on what kind of relationship parents and their children have ”in real life,” experts say. Are your children able to confide in you about the everyday happenings in their lives, as well as problems they may have encountered?

”If you don’t have that degree of trust off-line, you won’t get it online,” says Steve Jones, a University of Illinois at Chicago communications professor who specializes in new media. ”The chances of your kid wanting to be your friend on Facebook and share stuff with you online is almost nil.”

Families are dealing with the social media issue in a number of ways, from insisting to be friended so they can monitor their children to spending time online together and sharing tentative Facebook friendships.

Becca Hansen’s mom seemed shocked when the 17-year-old accepted her friend request.

”I guess she expected me to deny her or something, but I friended her right away because I already tell her everything,” says Hansen, adding that her mom is also friends with her boyfriend and best girlfriend. ”She knows when I go to parties and who I hang out with. My friends think I’m kinda crazy for being so close with her.”

On the other hand, Shelby Crumley, 15, isn’t friends with her mom on Facebook, and her mother has never asked to be. Instead, Vivien Crumley, 53, takes a different approach: Every once in a while, she will look over Shelby’s shoulder while she’s on Facebook at the communal laptop in the kitchen and ask her questions.

”It doesn’t bother me as long as she’s not doing that every day,” says Shelby. ”Sometimes she will ask about what someone just said to me and what it means, or if she sees a name she doesn’t recognize she will ask me who it is.”

The method is called co-viewing, says Larry Rosen, a California State University psychology professor and author of ”Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

”It really shows you care what your child is doing and not just releasing them to the technology,” Rosen says. ”Ask them to show you what they do on Facebook, and offer lots of reinforcement for good stuff they do. Kids crave attention and will likely be proud to show you what Facebook is all about unless they are hiding something.”

Teens today develop their identities in part online in a public diary of posts, what values they share in their ”About Me” section, and the music, quotes, comments and pages they ”like.”

Conflicts occur when those expectations aren’t in sync for parent and teen, teens and their friends and a larger world audience.

”Many teens think of Facebook as a place to get away from their parents, but I think of Facebook as a place to be a part of a community,” says Ella Westerfield, 13. ”I can relate to friends from around the world, or just keep in touch with my sister in college. My dad is always posting fun quirky things on Facebook that are different than what he says when I see him everyday.”

The Economic Time ©2011