Journal of Communication ISSN 0021-9916 ORIGINAL ARTICLE The Impact of Parents ‘‘Friending’’ Their Young Adult Child on Facebook on Perceptions of Parental Privacy Invasions and Parent–Child Relationship Quality Maggie Kanter, Tamara Afifi, & Stephanie Robbins Department of Communication, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 90049, USA This study examined whether a parent ‘‘friending’’ his/her child on Facebook.com influenced the parent – child relationship and perceptions of parental privacy invasions. One hundred and eighteen parent – young adult child dyads were randomly assigned to an experimental group where the parent was asked to create a Facebook account, ‘‘friend’’ his/her child, and use the account over 2 months or a control group where the parent did not have a Facebook account. Having a parent on Facebook did not result in perceptions of greater privacy invasions, but was associated with decreased conflict in the parent – child relationship. When the parent and child had a more conflicted relationship prior to the parent joining Facebook, the parent’s presence on Facebook also enhanced the child’s closeness with the parent. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01669.x Although the issues of sexual predators, school officials, and future employees access- ing social networking sites (SNS) have became areas of concern among adolescent and young adult SNS users, there is one audience with whom they are perhaps even more concerned: their parents. Websites such as myparentsjoinedfacebook.com are now commonplace on the internet, perpetuating the fear that when parents ‘‘friend’’ their child (or add their child to their list of contacts on their SNS, allowing each other to view certain information), their child’s life—as the site’s motto proclaims—‘‘is over.’’ Contrary to these speculations, researchers do not know with certainty how young adult children feel about their parents ‘‘friending’’ them or how it affects the parent–child relationship. With a wide variety of audiences using SNS, an increasing trend is to limit one’s social status to ‘‘friends only’’ to restrict one’s privacy boundaries (see Stutzman & Kramer-Duffield, 2010). However, the boundaries become blurred when young adult children consider whether their parents should be included in this social network. New technologies reduce costs and increase the ability to share information, but with the inevitability of surveillance and monitoring, they also make privacy Corresponding author: Tamara Afifi; e-mail: tafifi@com.ucsb.edu Journal of Communication (2012)  2012 International Communication Association 1