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John Butler seems to be pretty on top of things with his daughter, Gabi. She has her own personal facebook and they created an additional fan page so she can post updates on what she's doing, photos, vids etc. Good way to control privacy and not feel like you have to add everyone you met at a competition as a friend. There are a lot of innocent young fans that get a little obsessed, but there's also a handful of creepy men.
Thanks for the kind words BowCat. I'll share a little of what we've seen in the hopes it will help others.
It's funny, because my daughter doesn't like the attention. To be honest, she's still trying to get used to even being called a cheerlebrity or whatever. She always tells me, "But I'm just a little girl dad. There are SOOOO many people that are way better than me." She gets mad if i even so much as post a video of her. It took us quite some time to come to an agreement. I had to sit down with her and really have some deep conversations about the good and bad of being someone that others look up to. I explained that sometimes in life you're simply put in a situation where others are going to look up to you because of what you can do, and that there's nothing wrong with that as long as you approach it in a humble and grateful way. She has learned to see that other girls look to her for inspiration and support. It has been very humbling for her, but she has learned that she can help others by just being herself and offering support where she can.
Of course, I have also had to explain that because of the attention, there will be some that will dislike her and be envious or jealous. In addition, I explained the dangers of being online and we VERY closely monitor everything she does. We created an athlete page on Facebook first, before she ever had a facebook acount. This way her friends could post to her, but she had limited access to Facebook and had to be logged onto one of our accounts to use her page.
Of course, as she got older, she really wanted to be able to have a real account, so we created one for her. We watch the page regularly and monitor and approve all of her friend requests. However, even that has gotten difficult because she was getting so many. In hindsite, we should have only allowed people that she knew personally to be added as friends on her real page and directed everyone else to the athlete page. I say this because now she has almost the limit of friends and often times can't see what her real local friends are doing because there are too many people on her friends list. There are also a lot of her pictures that have been taken and posted in other places. Thus far nothing malicious has happened, but if I had my choice it wouldn't have worked out that way as we would have only shared certain pictures. Now we are trying to determine the best approach to make adjustments.
At the end of the day, there's only so much you can do. These days, it only takes one person to share a wrong video or a picture and that's the end of it. So we just do our best to monitor whatever we can. And to answer the question originally asked of this thread, I would say the determination of whether it's a good thing or a bad thing depends on the values instilled in the person. I have seen many use it as a way to inspire others and do good things with every opportunity. I have also seen some who allow it to go to their heads and become bitter and nasty towards others. So in the end... it really all comes down to the person being recognized.
PS. For those parents out there who really care to monitor their children's activities online, there are various programs on the web which you can purchase that will monitor every message sent and every letter typed on your child's keyboard (behind the scenes) and also on their smart phones to monitor texts. They may think it's an invasion of their privacy, but as far as I'm concerned, I will be invading her privacy until I feel it's time to stop... maybe like when she's 40 or so.
