I wanted to pick up on my friend Brian’s comment on “what happened to the mall?” (8/5/08). He sees no evidence in his personal experience of an inverse relationship between supervision and delinquency, for lack of a better word. Neil Swidey seems to agree with Brian in his article “Spying on the Texting Generation” (link below) in the June 8 edition of The Boston Globe Magazine. Swidey sees dangers in the overprotective parent, because trust isn’t built between parents and children, and because children become too reliant on parents to set limits, never allowing them to establish an “internal locus of control” (a buzz-phrase in middle and high schools, especially in special education). Swidey also brings up how distasteful full disclosure can be; how much do you as a parent really want to listen in on the inanities of adolescent conversation?
Returning to our discussion about the mall, I guess part of my revulsion to the mall scene stems from my concern about the sexual promiscuity of today’s adolescents. Oppressive supervision is not the answer, as both Brian and Swidey point out. But whether the method of relating to others is IMing, texting or flirting, some sort of phantom parental presence is needed. One parent that Swidey interviewed neatly personifies the spectre: “Calling it his ‘fear of God’ speech, Greg warned (his children), ‘I can know everything you’re doing online. But I’m not going to invade your privacy unless you give me a reason to.’” Ahhh, the beauty of the threat that deters without deployment. And who knows, those kids at the mall might all have the “fear of God” in them, they just needed to act like teenagers, which naturally is distasteful to me (nasty creatures, those adolescents). 
The Swidey article is pretty fascinating, especially to somebody like me who is looking forward (?) to guiding his children through adolescence. Many good tips on how to keep tabs.
Sorry, the link to the article is below in the first comment. Rookie!
August 16, 2008 at 12:18 am |
sorry, can’t figure out what went wrong with including the link. Here it is again: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2008/06/08/spying_on_the_text_generation/
August 19, 2008 at 8:01 pm |
Parental supervision is definitely needed with adolescents.
August 25, 2008 at 12:57 pm |
I enjoyed the article in the Globe that is linked above. I am certainly curious about the oncoming teen years and what they will bring for my “tweener” daughter.
The technology issue is a pretty complex one. I think a lot of the cellphone stuff stems from a parent’s insecurity – either that their kid won’t know what to do in a dangerous situation, or that their kid will be ostracized because they are not “in the loop”. I think either of these issues, addressed genuinely and directly can be worked through and solved, and I’ll bet the change that comes is at least as much in the adult as it is in the kid. Hopefully, we’re raising our kids to be competent and confident as far as safety goes. “Whaddaya do if you encounter a dog that is not tethered (or where I live, a bear)? How do you read the situation?” This, of course, can be applied to “stranger danger/red light greenlight people” or tornadoes or sudden ICBM attacks. If you talk to your kid about it in a calm and confident way, and take the time to make sure they’re confident about their competence in finding a solution, I think they should probably be OK. If you talk about it in a panicky way or if you merely rely on the cellphone, then the kid will probably freak out. But I like what the author of the article said about how being a teenager is partly about figuring out how to deal with a situation like that.
Then there’s the social insecurity. We all want our kids to be liked, and have friends and feel good about their social standing. But where do we draw the line on vicarious peer pressure? When I was growing up, a kid moved into our cookie-cutter, conform-or-die-socially, white middle class town who did things a bit differently. His folks were hippies, and while there were several glaring differences in how he did things, the biggest cultural gap, I think, was his lack of cable TV. So much of our conversation centered around what was on TV the night before, and he was constantly left out.
Now my kid is this kid. Her friends don’t believe her when she says she doesn’t have a TV (not some high and mighty crusade for me, I just know I wouldn’t get anything done if I were watching all the time). I don’t want her to have a cell phone, and I don’t . But already, so much of our culture is depending on it. A parent will ask me if I can watch her kid at the park or the playground with the idea that I’ll call them when we’re heading home, as they’ll be drifting about the town from errand to errand. And I have to watch them rethink everything when I tell them I can’t call and we’ll have to actually make a plan NOW to reconnect later. And this is adults who haven’t grow up with connectivity as the norm. What will this mean for her socially?
I hope she will understand that her friendships are made of something much stronger than whether or not she is textable at this moment, and if her pals hatch a plan to go for pizza after school, they’re bound to find her and tell her, because she’s worth the effort. But I have to believe it first. As for computers, I tell her friends’ parents when she goes over to play that we have a “no computers” policy, and all seem to agree that there are better ways for kids to be social when they get together than going on the computer. For now, at least.
The trust issue cannot be overstated either. Again, I’ll refer to the article. One of the best points made is that being a teenager is figuring out how one deals with the reality that there will be times when you are unsupervised. A kid who feels trusted is more likely to see that the “grown up” thing to do when unsupervised is to do nothing out of the ordinary, and the kid who is overly scrutinized is more likely to utilize that time out of the ever-watching eye to misbehave. After all, it is exhausting to be watched constantly, and it builds resentment. Growing up, I saw so many people make really awful choices as adolescents citing the excuse “well, since everybody thinks I’m a druggie anyway” (substitute slut, thief, liar, etc.). Mistrust + low self esteem with a liberal splash of anger/resentment is not going to produce a healthy adolescence.