By Brooks
high tech parenting
Middle school was a different time. We didn’t know it then, but we had the luxury to think about scholastic challenges with our boy. Learning, performing, honing skills, in general a constructive set of challenges–the kind that leave everyone (student/teacher/parent/bystander) better off for trying, these were on the table. It was the calm before the storm.
High school came in like a lamb and quickly morphed into a lion. The steady girlfriend was announced a couple of weeks into it and nothing has been the same since. Grades have gone into the dumper. Cell texting and computer chatting consumes all time and destroys most continuity of independent teenage thought. We parents have become the other, the enemy, the loathed murderers of love.
Our peaceful life in the country is fraying under the stress of a tech savvy 14 year old female predator obsessed with marrying our 15 year old son and having his children. I’ll admit, I’ve used hyperbole on occasion. I wish this was hyperbole. And this. And this. The smiley emoticons are cute, but they lose some of their charm when it’s you they’re talking about burying.
The girl pursues him relentlessly every waking moment through texting, sexting, chatting, email, and as a last resort, actual voice phone calls. The boy, raised as an innocent and to not be a victim, thinks this obsession feels wonderful. He’s in love and the rest of life has become a distraction he would rid himself of if he could.
The girl uses her own cell phone, her mother’s cell phone, her father’s cell phone when she can get it, and of course her computer to text and email the boy roughly about once every minute or so of waking time–many hundreds of contacts each day. Her parents don’t seem to exert any control over her electronic obsessions. She uses various online chat clients like facebook and yahoo messenger in addition to email from a variety of sources–cell phone texts, cell phone email, regular isp email, facebook email, etc.
We’ve had to become quite sophisticated in parental controls at the cell phone provider interfaces, the email provider interfaces, and even a sophisticated network router at home, to shut her electronic harassment down while keeping the various electronic tools available to my son for other uses and users. My wife handles the cell phone side of it, I do the rest. It’s taken us months to figure out how to effectively block a determined cyber stalker.
It was our mistake to expect the kids would use all of these connectivity tools responsibly. Perhaps some do, but I expect that’s the exception and that it’s more likely this kind of thing goes on without a lot of parental awareness. Judging by how complicated the remedies are, I bet a lot of parents have no idea what they’re up against.
Dangers of Technology: Cyber-bullying, stalking can have damaging effects
Almost four out of ten teens are either the bully or the victim and girls are twice as likely to do it.
“The boys have a tendency to do more of the physical bullying; face to face. The girls tend to do this social sabotage thing on Facebook, MySpace,” says Stanton.
http://www.stopbullyingnow.hrsa.gov/adults/cyber-bullying.aspx