Recently, in my Parent Education sessions, I’ve been focusing a great deal on how to bring up topics related to Cyber-bullying, Loss of Privacy, Sexting and Predators with our children. After my lecture, the last thing I want to have happen is a parent return home and bombard a child with all of the new information they’ve just learned. This is a recipe for disaster where the child will shut down and stop listening.
Instead I’ve recommended finding ways for the conversation to happen more organically. Using the media to discuss these issues is often very helpful. While in the car listening to the radio you may hear of nude photos of celebrities surfacing on the web, this is a great time to talk about sexting. By the way, the car is REALLY the best place to talk about sexting, there is no eye contact that needs to be made, you have a captive audience (unless they are so uncomfortable they are willing to dive out onto the freeway), and there is an end-point to the conversation…when you reach your destination, it’s over!
Tivoing a news segment on a cyber-bullying related suicide, Internet predators grooming teens or identity theft due to over-friending on Facebook and having your teenager watch it for themselves is another way to get the conversation started.
Now, Laurie David, author of The Family Dinner, has prompted the Huffington Post to get involved too with the Family Dinner Download. Every Friday, the Huffington Post will run an article meant to “spark lively discussion among the whole family” at the dinner table. Hopefully this will get kids and their parents sharing feeling, opinions about what is going on in the world around them. This week’s topic was RIGHT IN LINE with my own crusade… Willon Palin (the 16-year old daughter of former Governor Palin) trashing schoolmates on Facebook after they attacked her mom’s new reality TV show.
The article highlighted in the HuffPost Family Dinner Download will include questions to get the conversation started at the dinner table. To me, this is reminiscent of my own childhood. Many nights at our dinner table, my father would require we come to the table with a current event to discuss. At first, this drove me nuts, especially considering the fact that I hated to touch the newspaper because the ink always got on my hands, but once my father engaged me in conversation it was always a lively debate. I developed my political views by the age of 12 (mostly in opposition to my father’s just to spite him) and became a full-fledged vegetarian after researching animal cruelty. I came to my own conclusions on many issues.
Point is you need to make sure that you don’t lecture at your children! Let them gather the information and then ask them how they view it, feel about it, how it affects their lives. Let them talk while you listen and maybe even learn. When it comes to the online space, your children are often the ones setting the rules. But do they know enough to be making up the right rules for themselves is really the question. We as parents need to accept that they may know more about the technology, but we still understand behavior better than they do, and that’s where the focus should lie.
