George Welsh says he’s having an “Archie Bunker moment.” The superintendent of Cañon City Schools in Colorado was interviewed this week for a public radio podcast about the “sexting ring” that was discovered in the high school he oversees.
At first, he noted that the hundred or so students who had been trading hundreds of nude photos probably didn’t realize the implications of their actions and someone needs to explain it to them.
“Kids just don’t get when you share this with one person you’ve lost all control.” But then, as with so many adults these days, he seemed to wither under the pressure of adolescents.
Like the protagonist on “All in the Family,” Welsh told his interviewer, “Maybe time has passed me by. Meathead [Archie’s son-in-law] says human bodies are beautiful and why can’t a person if they choose to . . . why can’t they share it with someone else?” Welsh shrugs his shoulders: “I don’t have the answer.”
Well then perhaps you shouldn’t be in charge of a school system. Welsh approvingly notes that his own seventh-grade daughter says she would never send nude pictures of herself to someone else and doesn’t know anyone who would. But for some reason he does not see fit to give other people’s children the same guidance.
Cañon City parents, meanwhile, are up in arms that their teens may actually be charged with a felony — the distribution of child pornography — as a result of sending these pictures. Law enforcement is an awfully blunt instrument for dealing with these issues. But that’s what happens when parents and educators abdicate their responsibilities.
It’s easy, on the one hand, to see why parents have been cowed in the face of these pressures. First they are told that restricting kids could never work. As Regina, the mother of one middle school student told me recently, it’s just like drinking. There is a chorus of parents out there who say their kids are going to drink anyway so they might as well host the party. “No,” she told me. It’s not inevitable. Just because some rules will be broken, doesn’t mean that no rules should be set down.
There is a lot of pressure to go with the flow when it comes to technology, but she says, “Just because it’s the wave of the future, doesn’t mean my eighth-grader needs to be on Snapchat.”
The pressure is not only coming from other parents. Take a recent article in the Atlantic called “Parents: Reject Technology Shame” by Alexandra Samuel, in which the author writes: “Vilifying the devices’ place in family life may be misguided.”
Based on interviews with families, she determines that those who limit technology, as opposed to those who “mentor” their children’s technology use are more successful in teaching their children how to navigate the online world.
The children of “limiters” are “twice as likely as the children of mentors to access porn or to post rude or hostile comments online.”
Samuel doesn’t seem to account for the possibility that people limiting their kids’ technology use may simply be reacting to bad behavior they’ve already exhibited online. But she assures us that “It’s not our job as parents to put away the phones. It’s our job to take out the phones and teach our kids how to use them.”
Yes, obviously once you give your kids access to the Internet or a smartphone, it’s important to teach them what’s appropriate. But limiting their access can be a huge part of that.
Parents who keep devices in public places, who ensure that kids don’t go to sleep with their phones, and who restrict what kinds of features are enabled and whom they are allowed to communicate with are all making sensible decisions.
Parents regularly complain that they don’t understand all the different ways their kids can get around their restrictions. For some, this is a reason to just throw in the towel. One professor told The Wall Street Journal that parents shouldn’t bother checking the kids phones: “Kids are smarter than us and will figure out a way to get around us.”
We’ve been hearing that line since it was accepted that 5-year-olds were more adept at programming VCRs than their parents. But the notion that parents should give up is nonsense. If you don’t have the ability to figure out if your kids are sending naked pictures of themselves or others, you should find someone who does. And if you can’t, your kid shouldn’t have a phone.
But proclaiming your ignorance about all things technological and then handing your kid the keys to the Internet is bad parenting. Better to let them think you’re watching closely. As one mother explained, “I tell my daughter, ‘It’s my phone. You’re just borrowing it.’ ”
[NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY - New York Post]
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