What the hell?! I'm laughing out loud at my dumb ass parents.With technology wrapped securely in peer pressure, cyber-sex, communicating and conniving is extremely easy for teenagers today. As parents, we can guide and teach our children to do right from wrong, but it's challenging when you're up against technology to raise teenagers these days. We can shelter and mold, but eventually, your teens will go "outside." And when they do, let' hope the safety shields we've erected around them don't break.
During my generation as a teen, our parents thought it was hard to raise us. There were no cell phones, iPhones, iPods or any of the other techology that's available to teenages today. But somehow, my parents always managed to find out what I had going on.
It was that damn village! You know the village: "the one that it takes to raise one child." Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Taylor. Yes. That one. No matter where I went, by the time I got home, my mom and dad knew of my every move. Prying eyes made it extremely difficult to even think about kissing, let alone having sex.
I begin to take notice of the realness of technology when, on one ocassion, I took my daughter's phone thinking I was punishing her by temporarily cutting off her connection to "her world," but soon enough I realized it didn't matter. There are so many other ways to "stay connected."
You can text on the iTouch and on a Wii. At school, although they claim to install filters and blocks, social networking sites, IM, e-mail and chat technology are accessible because teenagers know how to "back door" their way around the filters. Note: additionally, schools are becoming so Web-based that failing is almost a guarantee without liberal access to most areas on the Web!
Then there's dating by way of technology. (Dating? I call it fucking.) When I was in school, love notes went something like this: "Do you like me?" And at the bottom, the Yes or No check box would glare at you like the sun on ice. Today, MMS, social sites and Web cams makes it too easy to show a guy or a girl what you have to offer before they decide to give away their "cookies."
Monitoring your cell phone bill to keep track of who and what they text is no help. Sites like Text4free and other online phone systems help them out with that! You can turn off the radio and TV, but they can get movies and radio on phones, computers and iPods. And forget about when they go to school and use their friends' phones and pods too!
For now, it's an uphill battle. The best methods I've found so far is to spend as much time with them as you can and expose them to more positive things and culture. We take our teens' phones at night. After school, they go off between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. to make time for homework, family time and chores, then back off and in our room by 11 p.m. for the youngest and Midnight for the oldest.
Lucky charms, meditation and prayers to you parents!
PS-relying on that village is gone. Try to call a parent about their kid these days and the parents will come after you! Beat your kid and the cops come after you! *Sigh*
Until next time...
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