In what appears to be a study conducted in a room full of liars, Pew reports that only 60% of parents admit to checking up on their teenagers via social media.

That means that 40% of parents have never, ever, not even once peeked at their 14-year-old’s Facebook profile, Twitter page, Instagram profile, or anything.

Even accounting for parents who don’t care about their kids enough to even fake interest, parents that have never heard of social media, parents without computers, parents without hands to operate computers, and parents who give their teens privacy, this is a pretty high number.

According to Pew, moms were slightly more likely than dads to peek at their kids’ Facebook page.

I guess there are just a lot of parents who don’t know how to look up their kids on Facebook even if they wanted too, because 83% of Facebook-connected parents said they were friends with their teens.

If parents aren’t checking their kids’ Facebook pages, they certainly should be – as they’d probably find some interesting stuff. Teens really need to learn how to use privacy controls.

“While most teen Facebook users (85%) say their parents see the same content as everyone else, 5% say they’ve adjusted privacy settings to limit what their parents can see. Even though many teens haven’t used technological tools to shield their posting activity from their parents, teens have other ways to hide information from their parents’ gaze. A majority of teens (58%) also have obscured the content they share on social media in general, using inside jokes or other coded messages that only certain friends can understand,” says Pew.

Yeah, your parents don’t get your jokes. Sure they don’t.

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