Facebook opened on Sept. 26, 2006 to every one 13 and older with the simple intention of being a user-friendly social networking website to connect people with their friends and allow teenagers with no social skills to more easily stalk their classmates. It has its flaws, as does any website, but users were able to look past the information overload and poor design and focus instead on the plethora of ways to annoy all your friends creative and fun social applications. Now, however, a frightening trend poses a problem to Facebook users across the globe.

No, this is not about that one person (or in some unfortunate cases, several people) on your friends list who feel the need to update their status every hour on the hour and at times more frequently (“just chillin eatin chex mix” ; “omg I LOVE the hills!!!!!1!1!”), with the misguided belief that people actually care.

This is about that moment when you clicked the “1 new friend request” notification to find that it was from your mother. Or father. Or, worst of all, a grandparent.

“Both my parents have a Facebook, and my grandmother just got one,” senior Stefanie Goodman said. “‘Really, why do you need a Facebook, Grandma?’”

There are a number of things which are more appealing than allowing your parents to see every single interaction occurring between you and your friends, like throwing yourself into an active volcano or being crushed to death by a war elephant. But what is one to do when family members try to become one of your online companions? True, the parental movement to become more involved with their children’s lives while doing what they believe to be “hip” is good news for teenagers who have close relationships with their parents and don’t mind losing their online privacy, but bad news for anyone who’s normal.

“It just feels like you have no privacy,” sophomore Mariah Mercier said. “There are certain things parents don’t need to know about your life, which you would usually discuss with your friends on places like Facebook.”

Now, that’s impossible with mom and dad lurking. Talking on the phone is still an option, but what is this, medieval times? Still, contrary to popular belief, having your parents around is not the end of your life as you know it.

In fact, it’s easy to avoid losing all of your privacy if you simply take advantage of friend lists. Organize those family members which would best be left in ambiguity, who don’t need to read all of your statuses and see all of your pictures, into a tidy little group within your friends, and you can hide most things you do from their sight. But what makes having your family members around so nauseating is not the things you do which you don’t want them to see, but the things they do which you don’t want others to see.

Oh look, grandma just left a comment (in all caps) on your wall about the time you accidentally peed in the bathtub because she was just reminiscing. Meanwhile, your mom is commenting on each and every one of your pictures about how much you’ve grown and how she can still remember changing your poopy diapers, periodically interspersed with remarks about how skinny you look. Do parents truly feel the need to do this to their children? Obviously they do, as they broadcast these astute remarks to everyone on the Internet. 

“I’ll post a status about a problem I’m having or something and my dad will comment like, ‘Boy I’ve been there before,’” Goodman said. “And I’m like, ‘You know you’re downstairs right? You could just come tell me.’”

It’d be nice to end this with a motivational, positive expression of hope for the future, but there is no happiness to come. Your parents are not going anywhere and will likely be embarrassing you on Facebook for a long time. So you’ll just have to wait until a new social networking site becomes popular (and the average joe who created it becomes a billionaire) and pray mom and dad don’t decide to join the fun.  Until then, keep your fingers on the “delete” button, and for those lucky enough to have facebookless parents, keep them unmindful of this particular corner of the Internet.