By Jackie Burrell, Contra Costa Times

The angst was palpable on Facebook.

“My mom tried to add me on Facebook today,” read one online posting, “and I had to deny my own flesh and blood. You’d have done the same.”

Once upon a time, Facebook was a gathering place for college kids. No one had access to the social networking site started by Harvard students in 2004 without a university e-mail address.

But two years ago, Facebook opened its virtual doors to everyone and now, OMG. Parents are everywhere. Adults older than 35 accounted for 3.6 million — 9 percent — of the Facebook demographic last year and the numbers just keep growing.

Among them: University of California at Berkeley junior Molly Green’s parents. It “freaks people out,” she says, when Mom and Dad pop up online.

Facebook is “just such a part of our generation,” says Green, “that it doesn’t really make sense to me why my parents would want in on it. Most young people expect it to be a place where they interact with their friends, without worrying about what their parents will think.”

Several Facebook support groups have popped up in the past year, including the 709-member “And then my Mom joined Facebook” group, organized by “The Bureau of Endangered Generation Gaps” and featuring such discussion topics as “Should I Friend My Mom?”

While some parents get on Facebook to check up on their teens or stay close to kids away at college, many do so for work-related reasons — to interact with colleagues or, in the case of Walnut Creek, Calif., mom Karen Hershenson, because her employer, San Francisco Performances, wanted an online presence in the social networks.

But Hershenson worries about appearing intrusive to her college kids, and she’s still grappling with the strangeness of the language — the pokes, the friending and karma points — and hoping she doesn’t “make a cyber fool of myself.”

There’s no doubt teens and college kids think of Facebook as “theirs,” says Larry Rosen, a California State University-Dominguez Hills psychology professor who wrote “Me, MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation.”

Most Facebook users are savvy about Internet safety. They’ve played in this particular arena for years, and Mom and Dad’s sudden appearance in its hallowed virtual halls is viewed with more than a little suspicion, especially when they hear about it from their friends first, as in, “Your mom poked me.”

Talk to your teens before you friend them, Rosen says.

“Trust is critical,” he says. “You have to give your kids some privacy. Parents have to remember this is their social world.”

And discuss limits — on your behavior.

Contacting your teen’s friends on Facebook without his permission is tantamount, says Rosen, to saying, “ ‘Hey, give me a list of all your friends’ phone numbers for emergencies,’ and then you started calling your kids’ friends.”

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