Times change and parenting adapts, maybe somewhat like the law with technology, slowly to the shifting landscape in which we raise our children.  Borrowing a theme from a recent speaker on internet and child safety and aligning it with some recent GorT family goings-on, I thought I’d post a few thoughts.

Your Gormogons are all “Gen Xers” (I’m not up for debating that label nor its common perceptions or misconceptions) so as we grew up there were two ways into the home.  Into meaning to meet in some way to discuss the social plans of adolescents. First, there was the front door.  Friends (including boyfriends or girlfriends) would go to the front door and be admitted.  For the most part, the parents knew who was coming in and out of the house.  Second, there was the house phone.  Most of us grew up with two phones in the house – the first was in your parents’ bedroom which was either off-limits or avoided and the second was the “house phone” located in a central location like the kitchen or family room.  It was a corded phone so conversations took place in or near that central location.  Plans were made “in person” (either by a person to person conversation or face to face) and largely within earshot of other family members.

Our offspring have a different landscape and one that proves difficult for parents.  There are multiple ways “into” the home: the front door and house phone still exist (although some houses are ditching the “home phone” and going all cellular) but now we have cell phones, game consoles, networked devices like the iTouch or iPad, computers, laptops, even your BluRay DVD player or TV may be networked and your satellite or cable provider provides internet or internet-like access via those devices.  Compound all these access methods by the instant gratification services that social networking provides (Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Flickr, etc.) and it gets complicated fast.  We still deal with similar issues that face our parents and their parents before them: drugs, alcohol, sex.  But we need to deal with it in a new way.  Our job is hindered, to some degree, by a push for individual privacy – which is kind of a joke when one considers just how much information we willingly put out to publicly available places.  There have been successful experiments to guess the older mode of Social Security Numbers (newer SSNs don’t use the same issuing-location prefixes that the older SSNs do) using what people have publicly put on their Facebook pages.

What GorT has observed in his neighborhood, is a range of parental responses.  These likely map to parental responses to raising children in the past – but the amount and means of information exchange has exploded.  First, there are the parents who attempt to stay informed and provide the boundaries for their children.  These parents might limit access to some things (cell phones, SNS sites, etc.) or do so with some oversight – sharing of login information, reviewing text messages sent & received, etc.  The perception of a child sitting in some corner of the house or in their room, texting to make plans is one of secrecy.  It goes further when one considers the slang and shorthand used by children some of which are explicit warnings about parents observing their behavior.

Second are the parents who talk like they are the parents above, but fail to execute.  Sometimes, it’s simply that the child knows the technology better than the parent and the parent can’t anticipate or learn it quickly enough.  Some will rely upon the first set of parents to help while others will operate more like the next set of parents.

Third are the parents who don’t seem to care.  Yes, they love their children but in practice they are either too naïve or they are guilted into allowing behavior that they would otherwise not allow by their children (“my friends are allowed to do it” (lie – it’s likely the other children’s parents wouldn’t let them either), “everyone else is doing it” (insert lemmings/cliff speech that we’ve all heard here), etc.  Problems arise when a child of the first set is friends with a child of the third set. 

If it isn’t clear, GorT strives to be in that first group.  And it’s constant work.  Do we slip up?  Sure.  And to those that may take issue with us reading childrens’ text messages, Facebook posts, etc., I’d say: (a) they are our children and our responsibility and (b) the phone service, internet service, computer, etc. that they are using has been paid for by us so technically, they have no cell phone, they are only borrowing mine.

Recently, a group of boys in GorT’s Replicant #1’s class were observed wandering the local streets at a very late hour and it later came to light that they had helped themselves to some Vodka from one of their parents’ cabinets.  In a tight community such as ours, word got around fast and I can’t begin to imagine the embarrassment this caused the parents as I’m sure wind of the various rumors made their way through the neighborhood.

Now abstract that to behavior with a social networking site or text messages or even picture/video texts.  How well does your child control what their friends do with a text or picture that they willingly send to them?  Do they know who else gets it?  Do they know how it’s presented to others?

This is hard stuff to deal with but if you’re a parent willing to let your 13 year old daughter wander the streets of the local city in the dark, even though it’s a decent neighborhood and not a really late hour, with people that you are unaware have been invited and with no set plans, you may want to give it a second thought.  I’d wager she fed you a lie or provided some vague description about what she’s doing.  And if you believe that she’ll make the right decisions, then why isn’t she being upfront with you?

I use the term “millennials” loosely to mean those born roughly from the mid-1980s until the early 2000s.  Others may differ, but this suffices for this post.

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.