My teen daughter accidentally added a man looking for underage girls on Snapchat. Parenting a teen with social media is terrifying.

• Before my teen daughter joined Snapchat, we discussed social media's dangers.

• My daughter received a request on Snapchat from someone who said he went to a nearby high school.

• Turns out, the man was in his 20s and looking for underage girls; I was horrified.

I have a son and a daughter who are both teens now — but I spend so much more time worrying about my daughter than my son.

They are both great kids who do well in school, are active in the community, do extracurricular activities, and behave well. But being the parent of a girl in the age of social media is scary — even when you try to do everything right.

The most worrying was when she accidentally befriended an adult man on a social platform.

When social media entered the picture, my daughter and I had conversations about safety

When my daughter told me she wanted to join Snapchat, she had good reasons. It was how her high school sports teams communicated things like which jersey they wore to school and where and when the team dinners would be. Plus, the other kids in her class already had Snapchat, and it's the way teens communicate these days.

We agreed on a simple ground rule: She must come to me whenever something seemed off. Whenever she received a friend request that seemed remotely sketchy, my daughter would show me and decline it right on the spot.

That rule became murky because her Snapchat is often getting friend requests. We live in a small town, so the kids at my daughter's high school socialize with the students from neighboring small towns. Some of our high school's sports teams co-op with other schools, so we have enough players for a team. My daughter has made friends with kids from nearby schools and attended a dance at another school.

We weren't surprised when she got a friend request on Snapchat from a male who said he went to a nearby school. She saw they had several mutual friends and accepted the friend request.

Her new friend immediately reached out and said he was looking for a girlfriend

When she accepted the request, the friend said he was looking to date and wanted to see pictures of my daughter. As soon as he sent that message to her, she told me about it and let him know she already had a boyfriend. We didn't think much of it because she had gotten similar messages from boys at neighboring schools before. She immediately told them she was off the market but usually stayed online friends with them.

Weeks later, one of my daughter's friends was looking for a date to a school dance and didn't want to go with any of the boys at her own small school. That isn't unusual with class sizes of 35 students in my daughter's school. Many of the kids in my daughter's school date kids from a neighboring school because they get to know them through sports, activities, mutual friends, and social media.

To help her friend find a date to the dance, my daughter mentioned that she was Snapchat friends with a boy from another school who was looking for a girlfriend.

My daughter's friend reached out to the alleged high school boy. After she chatted with him for a while and fielded questions from him about what she looked like, the man confessed something surprising: He was actually in his 20s, and he had never attended the school he said he did. He was no longer in high school and was trying to meet underage girls.

My daughter's friend immediately told her about this man posing as a high school boy. My daughter unfriended him right away on Snapchat, and I was left feeling even more worried about social media than ever before.

I decided not to limit her social media usage

Even when you and your daughter do your best to use social media wisely and with caution, it's incredibly difficult to navigate safely. Even though this was an isolated experience, I find myself frequently wishing I had been able to raise my daughter before social media came into the picture. When I was in high school, if people wanted to reach me, they had to send me a note in school, call me on the phone, or come to my door.

I know some people would say the solution is to have my daughter withdraw from all social media accounts, but it isn't that simple. She would be excluded from team and club chats at her high school and wouldn't have as many friends.

Whether parents like it or not, social media has become an important way of communication in this day and age. All we can do is continue to monitor our children's accounts and try to teach them how to use them safely — and that sometimes means learning as we go along.

Read the original article on Business Insider