I'm almost speechless....so I'm going to ramble for awhile...

This is so incredibly wrong on so many levels.

The sheer idea of a family trying to sabotage a teenage girl online makes my skin burn. A mother helped create a fake MySpace profile so that she could see what a teenage girl down the street was saying about her own daughter. Then her and her daughter talked to the teenager as if they were some new person in the area that wanted to be her friend. After the fake person and the teen had become good friends, they told her they had heard she was mean and that they didn't want to be her friend anymore, then posted demeaning things about her online such as statements that she was a slut. As far as the girl knew, she had just lost a new friend and people were talking about her behind her back. She committed suicide that night, age 13.

Whether or not she had killed herself in the end, how could an adult not realize how wrong it was to purposefully try to upset and trick a child? Even if the teenager hadn't had depression to begin with, how devastating is it to be told that you are cruel and a bad friend when all you are trying to do is be yourself, fit in, and make friends? From my experience, adults tend to think children are "cruel" because they misunderstand their motivations and think them to be much more conniving than they are. Usually the kids are just making mistakes on interactions with others because they are still learning. It's a shame that a parent would treat a child as an adult, make such a poor decision on how to deal with what was probably a fight between two kids, responding is such a way that is not ever appropriate.

What is the world coming to that even an adult can be so vindictive and mean? Since when is such horrible ill-spirited trickery OK? How incredibly heartless.