Just A Guy Wondering Can He Trust His Teens With Social Media

Sexting, texting, e-mail, Twitter, MySpace, NetFlix, Facebook, formspring (not a mattress company), “smart” phones, iPads, iPods, laptops, etc. That’s the world our kids live in.  And, it’s moving faster everyday! Can we trust our kids with social media?

For me, it was a library card, and a book, on a roller-skate, which my friends and I would use to go down the hill where we lived. Oh, we also played a made-up game we called “Mongoose,” in which we hit a ping pong ball back and forth with two books, the object being to do it as long as possible.  We had a phone, but its use was limited. TV was only on weekends.  And, there were just three networks and not much else.

That just ain’t the world no more!  With the recent spat of texting related violent incidents, I’m beginning to question what boundaries we parents should consider for our kids, especially our teens, with these social media devices.  My 16-year-old got into a mess of peer trouble with an impolitic facebook post.  It was stupid, but not that big a deal.  At my urging, he even publicly apologized (and in a well-written, not too self-deprecating fashion – I was impressed).

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Just A Guy Whose Kids Say They’re Bored

I’m amazed when my boys tell me they’re bored.  Bored?  With all the options they have today?  The best response I ever heard to a kid saying “I’m bored” was “No, you’re boring.” A brilliant response from a parent and I wish I’d said it first.  It is not our job to be our kid’s entertainment coordinator.

When I was a kid, we played.  Seems kind of quaint.  We made up games.  One of my favorites was called Mongoose, where we took two books and hit a ping-pong ball back and forth between them with the object to see how long we could keep it going.  Then, they’re all the adventures we’d go on in our own Huck Finn way.  Places to explore, bikes to ride, trees to climb. read more