Here’s my dilemma. Again it revolves around parenting. Number two son has a Facebook account. He chats with relatives and friends, puts up pictures and checks on people he knows. He’s Facebook friends with a girl we’ll call Ellie. Ellie is a couple years younger than my son. She’s adorable. She has long brown hair and big brown eyes, dark eyelashes and rosy cheeks.
She’s the kind of kids that when she runs up to a teacher or coach with a question, they smile at her as she’s approaching them. People are grateful to her just for being in the room. She gets a little extra slack in most situations because she is just so dang cute. I think being cute has gotten her a pass on bad behavior in the past.
A while back she was cyber harassing my son Jasper on his Facebook page. She was writing insults and obscenities on his profile page. He was getting upset about it, and so was I. He had asked her to stop, and she didn’t, so I decided to send the girl an email to let her know that I could see what she had written, and so could everyone else, and that I wanted her to stop doing it. I didn’t want to get her into trouble, I just wanted to enlighten her.
I wrote a short email that said (more or less) “Ellie, you are a lovely girl, but when you write things like what you’ve been writing on Jasper’s wall, it makes you seem ugly. Please stop doing it. Jasper’s grandmas and grandpas are on Facebook and they can see those things you wrote. If you have some problem with Jasper and you can’t work it out, you can talk to a teacher or talk to me and I will try to help”
She sent me a nice email apologizing and saying she felt really bad, it wouldn’t happen again, she’d apologize to Jasper in school. I sent her one back saying not to worry, everyone makes mistakes, that she didn’t have to talk to Jasper because he didn’t know I was emailing her. She sent me another one back saying she was really, really sorry and she was friends with Jasper and they were just messing around, but they’re all cool now. I sent one back saying great, she didn’t have to keep apologizing about it. She sent me another saying things were totally cool with her and Jasper…. I stopped returning the emails.
Now she’s telling him his mom is creepy and won’t stop emailing her. She’s so sweet faced, and really well liked in school. I doubt anyone knows about her ugly side, but I think mean is mean, even when it comes from a petite, pretty girl. What should I have done differently? I don’t want to let kids bully my kid, but I don’t want to make him look like a mama’s boy, either.