Hardly an Internet party animal, I struggle to keep up with the real people in my life -- my husband, three children and a dog.

I don't have the patience to decipher the code names of IM communicators. So why join MySpace? My kids.

Two of the three are teenagers with elaborate, active and noisy MySpace pages filled with photos and comments that change often, and innuendoes that boggle -- and sometimes shock -- a middle-aged mind.

A simple request to see their pages was greeted by alarm and a quick flurry of deletions.

An attempt to access the pages was blocked by a stern notice about the sites being "private."

The way into the adolescent kingdom, it seems, is by invitation only -- by becoming a "friend" of the site subject.

So I gave my teens a choice: Make me a "friend" or lose the hard drive. I won.

Yet, to be a "friend," I had to have a MySpace page.

The online registration gave me four choices (click one): dating, serious relationship, friends or networking.

I chose "networking"; it sounded the most grown-up.

Let me assure you that I have a life -- a busy one.

My children are the most important people in that life, though, and I have learned that MySpace provides a window into their world that allows me to keep tabs on their friends, their words (warning to parents: The Eddie Haskells in your kitchen are potty mouths on the Web), their comings and goings, and, most important, their core characters.

Before I entered their world, I let my teens know I'd be dropping in on their sites at will.

If I found anything objectionable, I told them, they'd have about 20 seconds to clean up their act. Repeated offenses would result in their mother's face showing up on their comments page with admonitions to clean it up or lose the computer.

How cool is that?

I also told them I'd be monitoring their friends, making note of whom I trust and whom I don't.

The next time a "don't" asks one of them to a party -- sorry.

(Note to parents: MySpace comments often include photos -- sometimes barely decent photos, which do, in fact, say more than a thousand words -- that, in turn, make it easier to identify friends and foes.)

What about my kids' right to privacy?

My short answer: Such a "right," I think, is something made up by a 15-year-old and somehow universally swallowed by parents afraid to challenge the concept. My children have no more a "right" to privacy than they have a "right" to the car keys. (And "privacy" coupled with "Internet" sounds like the mother of all oxymorons.)

At such a time when my teens are paying for the computer, the manicured nails on the keyboards and the roof above it all, they will have their privacy. Until then, in the words of another leader who found himself on the wrong side of privacy advocates, I'm the Decider: I decide what comes into my home.

Critics will say I don't trust my children (I don't; what parent of a teen does or should?), that I'm sheltering them (I'm not; if I were to shelter them, we wouldn't have a computer), that I'm embarrassing them (I am; that's what parents of teens do) and that they'll find a way around me (yes, but at least they'll have to go around me).

If on a trip to the zoo my children fell into the lion's den, I wouldn't stop to evaluate whether my subsequent presence in the den would be an embarrassment or intrusion, or whether they would hate me for being there. The "railing" in their world is only as strong as I make it, and the dangers at the bottom are very real.

Do my children hate me? No, they love me and tell me so every day -- as I do them.

They hate that I intrude on their world. And I love them right back.