DadTalk

Stalk Your Kids on Social Media

Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

It’s fun. It’s hip. It’s the best way to keep tabs on your children.

How Much Privacy Should Parent’s Grant Kids’ Digital Life?

Scenario: Your 13-year-old daughter comes home from school, runs crying up to her bedroom with cell phone in hand.

Do you:

1. Go up and talk to your daughter but don’t ask to see the message on the phone.
2. Demand to see the messages on the phone.
3. Go back to making dinner and pretend nothing happened.

Happily for me, I’m still years away from having to make that decision. My oldest is only 6, and he does not have cell phone or even Internet connectivity.

But eventually, I, like many parents, will face unhappy technology scenarios and subsequent “values” decisions. The key question in my mind: how intrusive of privacy should parents be when it comes to technology?

Consider the latest social/legal conundrum facing authorities and parents in Greensburg, Pa. There, three teenage girls sent nude photos of themselves via cell phone to teenage boys, reports The New York Times.

Arguing Reveals Heart Risk, Especially in Women

My wife and I don’t argue that much. Occasionally we snap at each other about this irritant or that, but rarely do we engage in a true fight.

When we do let loose, we both express ourselves freely. In other words, we say what we’re thinking.

It turns out that it is good for married women to get their feelings off their chests, reports The New York Times. Women who keep quiet during fights were four times as likely to die over a 10-year period in this latest Framingham, Mass., Heart Study. Whether the woman was happy or not in the marriage didn’t effect the outcome, the study found.

“When you’re suppressing communication and feelings during conflict with your husband, it’s doing something very negative to your physiology, and in the long term it will affect your health,” Elaine Eaker, an epidemiologist and the study’s lead author, told the Times. “This doesn’t mean women should start throwing plates at their husbands, but there needs to be a safe environment where both spouses can equally communicate.”

So should men express their feelings or keep quiet? Apparently, it doesn’t matter for their own health, the study says.

Instead, men who adopt a controlling argument style are more likely to face increased heart risk. Here’s an example of a controlling husband speaking to wife about money: “You really should just listen to me on this.”

I would have a heart attack if I talked that way, because my wife would throw a plate at me.

But talking mean to your wife is more likely to hurt her, the study found. Saying something like “Did you pass elementary school math?” during an argument about money does more harm than just hurt feelings. Words like that kill.

Top Reasons for Arguing

	Women	Men
Children	9.7%	5.6
Sex	7.1	9.1
Housework	8.7	4.2
Money	8.5	6.2
Leisure	8.1	6.2
Alcohol	7.2	4.4

Many Children Accidentally See Porn on Web, Study Finds Here’s What You Can Do

About 42 percent of Internet users from ages 10 to 17 say they’ve viewed porn in the last year, reports The Associated Press via The Hartford Courant. Of those kids, 66 percent said they had not sought out the images. And about 16 percent of kids 10- to 11-years-old were exposed to porn against their will, according to the survey. Keep in mind that the porn threshold used by the study is fairly low: a naked body.

But there is no question that children are exposed to unacceptable images and videos. The problem is blamed on a variety of factors: kids, many technically more capable than their parents, employ tools such as file sharing, chat and online games. And of course there are sites such as MySpace and Flickr, where monitoring against porn can be difficult.

But a number of respondents say that an ordinary web search can result in porn popping onto their screens. If that is happening, it is highly likely that these computers are teeming with spyware. (I wrote this article (doc) for the Los Angeles Times a few years ago to explain spyware.)

Rather than pontificate about how parents should do this or that, I’m just going to offer suggestions on the jump on how to keep your children safe from pornography if it is important to you:

A Freaky Dance Freaks Out Principals, Parents

Have you ever heard of Freak dancing? According to descriptions in the media, it’s a form of extreme dancing that involves sexual bumping, grinding and teasing that would make a harlot blush.

Many principals are clearly unhappy with the practice, reports The New York Times. The Los Angeles Times wrote about the issue a few months ago.

Every generation of kids comes up with a new form of dance, though Freaking seems to be particularly pornographic with “girls playing out, or being forced to play out, sexually submissive roles,” principal James Chupaila Tells the Times.

Here’s a description of the dance from Providence Journal columnist Froma Harrop:

It’s a representation of anal sex set to hip-hop music. The boy makes thrusting moves at his partner’s rear. Sometimes the girl hikes up her skirt to facilitate contact. And if she’s feeling athletic, she may assume the doggy-style sexual position, bending over and putting her hands on the floor. One variation has two males surrounding a female and rubbing at her front and back. Other names for this dance are “grinding,” “the nasty” or just “freaking.”

To a large degree, the kids are emulating what they see in music videos, the Times reports. As someone who watches little TV and hasn’t been to a high school dance in 25+ years, it’s hard to tell how much this debate is hyperbole versus a real problem.

Lyrics of popular songs lead me to believe that women – worse girls – are being increasingly objectified as sexual objects by modern music. Last week when I accidentally turned on a hip hop song, my wife nearly blew a gasket over the foul and dehumanizing lyrics. I have no idea who the artist was.

I tried to find examples of the dance on YouTube, but most clips were short and not relevant to the debate. I did find a KTLA-TV news clip on the issue, which shows a little of the dancing style.

For the moment, it looks like this whole debate is based on anecdotal evidence, which I’ve found very few examples of. So, I’m very much interested in hearing from parents who have seen these dances. What do you think? Just how graphic are these dances? Should they be stopped, at least in the public school setting? Are the dances so demeaning you would pull your kids out?

Picking Traits of Our Children Poses Some Thorny Questions

Would you willingly choose to have a dwarf or deaf child instead of a “normal” one? Apparently, some parents are doing just that, writes Dr. Darshak Sanghavi in a New York Times essay.

Notice I put quotes around the word “normal.” Why? To some dwarfs and deaf people, their traits are just that, normal. After all, these two traits can be traced deep into recorded human history.

But while the Times’ essay focuses on the moral right or wrong of favoring or choosing these traits, I have a different question. As our societies increasingly use materials that permanently damage human DNA and create new traits, should we allow them to propagate into the human genome? Should we stop them? Should we pick and choose?

Some of these traits will take care of themselves: the very traits may damage reproductive ability or kill at a young age. Some of these traits even may be deemed beneficial.

But many may fall somewhere in the middle. Take this hypothetical: Let’s say industrial hormones that contaminate our drinking water permanently alters human DNA in some people to create androgynous children.

These children are healthy in every way, but in this scenario each has male and female genitalia. Now this trait occurs occasionally in nature, but in this case we’re looking at a permanent, artificial cause. Mutation before they have children? Or because the trait is benign – at least biologically – should they be free to let the genetic mutation swim out into the gene pool?

I think most people will reflexively pick their respective sides. But I don’t see clear-cut answers here. How does society determine what is a good trait and what is a bad one? Mutations have been occurring throughout the evolutionary process.

The dwarfs mentioned in the Times essay, prefer short stature. They don’t care how they came by it. It may be that our hypothetical androgynes don’t care how they became that way either.

Should we?

NYT Peeks Into World of Webcams, Child Porn

Editors of This New York Times story I’m about to discuss, which involves child pornography, should have warned how upsetting it might be to parents. Be aware that my post below discusses said upsetting issue.

It took me a long time before I was comfortable posting pictures of my children on DadTalk. After all, it is very easy to appropriate a picture, alter it and use it for nefarious purposes. I don’t know if my fear was misplaced or not, but eventually, I relaxed a bit and decided to run selected pictures.

I bring this up because technological advancements are moving faster than we can determine whether the innovations are good, bad, neutral or all of the above.

It turns out some technology, such as webcams and high-speed internet connections, can be a predator’s dream. Just ask Justin Berry, a boy who was lured into the latest version of the child pornography subculture, reports The New York Times.

Justin was a 13-year-old boy when he received his first webcam. As soon as Justin’s image showed up online, male predators started asking him to disrobe. They sent him money and gifts via Amazon.com. Eventually he made hundreds of thousands of dollars for his sexual poses. Justin developed a following of about 1,500 perverts who prodded him into broadcasting his eventual sexual activity.

In an unusual but sensible break with journalistic tradition, New York Times writer Kurt Eichenwald became part of this story by persuading Justin, who is now 19, to give up webcam porn and become a witness against those who are committing sex crimes against children.

I won’t go into the more gory details of the story, which is lengthy. But as I said at the beginning of this post, it’s an example of how some parents can lose their kids, at least in part, to technology. For those wondering, the story describes how Justin was able to hide his alter ego from his mom.

Granted, Justin does not come from a healthy family. At one point his biological dad, who was hiding from troubles in America, helped Justin run his pornographic webcam business from Mexico.

But it also is clear that there are predators and vulnerable children out there. It is incumbent on parents, especially those who are not home for part of the day, to find ways to manage their children’s access to computers.

We’ve discussed before on this site that your child’s computer should be out in the open in a place easy for parents to observe. If computers are in a child’s room, they should not be hooked up to the Internet without software controls.

Norton Internet Security 2006, for example, allows users to control what programs and websites children can access. And fellow blogger Mark Sicignano sells ComputerTime, which limits the amount of time a child can spend on the computer.

When I was a kid, the lowly videotape was the vehicle that brought child porn into the home. Before that, it was magazines. Instant Messaging and chat rooms allow predators to pose as innocent children.

Even if parents know all this, they must remain vigilant for each new technological onslaught. Perhaps phone cams will become the tool of choice in the future. Or maybe it will be something that hasn’t hit the market yet. Even if our own kids are not in direct danger, we should also remember that one of their friends from the troubled family down the street might be.

Additional
Stories I haven’t had time to read yet.

• The Customers: Where the Credit Card Trail Leads
• The History: A Shadowy Trade Migrates to the Web
• The Law: Documenting a Crime That Thrives on Anonymity

Are Toddlers Ready for Sex Education?

When my wife was pregnant with Lael, we faced a common dilemma: how and when should we explain to our toddler son about his future sister?

Book publishers solved our problem by sending us Where Willy Went for Anne’s kid lit review site. Seth loved learning about Willy training for his big swim race from Mr. Brown to Mrs. Brown. And he seemed to understand that Willy fertilized Mrs. Brown’s egg, which resulted in a cute baby girl.

I don’t think we ever worried much about providing Seth a little sex education before he was 3. The lesson was needed to explain why mommy’s tummy was growing.

But some parents today have a different reason for teaching toddlers about sex: these moms and dads want to inoculate their children from eventual exposure to naughty images they will see on TV, on the Internet and in other media, reports The New York Times.

This education goes beyond our “Where Willy Went” story:

According to this approach, toddlers should learn words like “vulva” at the same time they learn “ears” and “toes,” benign-sounding myths about storks and seeds constitute harmful misinformation, and any child who can ask about how he or she was created is old enough for a truthful answer.

While many of us grew up believing that it’s detrimental to learn about intercourse at a tender age, experts such as Dr. Justin Richardson, author of Everything You Never Wanted Your Kids to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid They’d Ask), are calling that a myth. “If you’re talking about how babies are made, there’s no age at which it is harmful to learn that the penis goes into the vagina,” Richardson tells the Times.

Other experts go on to explain that lying – even a half truth – is the worst thing you can do if your child asks about sex. Just keep the answers simple and honest, they urge.

I have no idea if that early sex ed a good thing or a bad one. I’ve always been happy with the idea we would tell Seth and Lael as they express interest. Because we control TV, Internet and movie access, we don’t feel any pressure to hurry up sexual education. That may not be true in other families.

We don’t hesitate to teach the correct function of body parts, either. Otherwise, Seth would still believe that he was going to get pregnant when he became older. And we had to dissuade him of the idea that he would grow boobs and breastfeed Lael.

But it is interesting that our sexualized culture today is forcing parents – and preschools – to change values held for generations. I hope the experts keep in mind that in general it should be up to parents to decide when and how kids learn about sex.