A few years ago my supervisor at work, Julie, told me a
story about her preteen son and Facebook. She had always spoken about their
close relationship and the fact that he could and would tell her anything. She
knew her son was trustworthy and wasn’t concerned about the teenage years at
all.
It turns out she should have been. Because while her son may
have been trustworthy and a decent kid, not all of the kids he knew were.
She had access to his Facebook account and would log in
randomly to check his messages, look at his postings
and his page and just make sure everything was okay. Sometimes a message would
pop up from a friend of his and she would say hi and say it was his mom.
Sometimes she would write back as her son – what better way to test how he acts
towards others, right?
The problem began when an older teenage girl began messaging
him. Julie randomly checked in on his
Facebook account and then looked at his messages. Now, Julie was a woman in her
40’s and she was shocked by the things that were being said to her son. She
asked her son about it and he said that yes, he noticed it and he just ignored
it. She wondered why he hadn’t spoken to
her about it before.
I didn’t think she was being very realistic. What teenage
boy is going to tattle to his mother about an older girl who is sending him
sexual messages?
No matter how close they were, I’m sure he wasn’t comfortable
having that conversation with his mom. The
girl kept messaging him until finally Julie sent something back to her and
unfriended her from her son’s account. The damage had already been done though,
and these were only the things that she was able to see. How many messages had
already been deleted before she noticed this girl harassing him?
She began discussing different ways to monitor his accounts.
She ended up looking into ways to spy on cell phones without having the phone
with her. She googled ways to spy on cell phones without installing software,
so her son wouldn’t catch her. She was looking into anything and everything to
try to protect her son without completely cutting him off, and unfortunately she
just couldn’t find anything.
It’s been a few years and now that my own kids are getting
older she recently told me that this is possible to do now. She told me about
Auto Forward, a company that has what she calls the cell
phone spy elite. She told me it’s easy to install and easy to use, and it’s
a way for me to make sure that my kids are protected when they go online
because she doesn’t want my kids to go through what her son did.
Cell phone spy software is not just for people wondering “how
can I read my wife’s text messages without having her phone” anymore. My
friend wishes this was around when her son was a preteen, but although
it wasn’t I’m thankful she found it for me so I can use it to protect my
children.
