Parents: Quit playing and do your job!

Have you been privileged enough to spend time recently with some of today’s socially disassociated youth? Ever wonder where the little darlings picked up their social skills? Perhaps it’s the proud parent beside them, in designer clothes, with the Hollywood haircut and a blackberry glued to their ear?

Photo: Contributed - (Flickr user, yourdon)

The generation in school today, whether elementary or high school, is undergoing an evolution and transformation like none other in history. The electronic communication generation is going to shock the world in less than 20 years and we bought it, literally. A lot of parents have willingly condoned it, purchased it, and supported it, while completely forgetting to monitor it. Unless a parent has physically checked, observed, or is on top of it every day, they cannot say, with any certainty, that they really know what’s going on in their child’s cyber-world.

And the truth will shock even the most attentive parent. Given the negligent and narcissistic behaviours of some parents today, it’s really frightening to think where their kids go online.

It’s only when it’s too late (think riots) and they have to take responsibility for their child’s indiscretions, do they wake up and realize they helped create a monster. Some parents today have fallen into a false, child privacy rights trap. As if our tweens and teens have a legal, ethical and moral right not to be monitored and thus bestowed huge unsupervised boundaries. What teen has the experience and worldly knowledge to make filtering decisions in such an unsafe cyber world? The parents will wake up one day and realize just how mindless it was, to grant such freedom’s to mere minors.

By then the children will have a warped sense of sex (pornography) poor writing skills (LOL), limited attention spans (surfing), hardly recognisable social skills, and more than likely, limited comprehension skills. The same parents will look to blame teachers and schools, as if they should have guided their children through this new cyber age.

Some parents need to look at their ethical values and how they apply them; what is the priority? Time spent or money spent? Which one holds more value to the long-term investment of the child? Do parents really think toys, gadgets, and wants, are what’s really in the child’s best interest. Or is a slightly more prudent option available, such as time. 50 cent and Justin Berber probably don’t have a lot of quality insight on what’s really important in the world, but you do.

Some parents are gaining misguided self-worth for being a smother mother or helicopter parent, controlling and supervising every aspect of the child’s rearing, except the things that are really important to the development of the child. Values and virtues, attributes and qualities, actions and behaviours, things you do, that can’t be bought or pawned off on surrogate parental role models such as coaches and teachers. These where taught to us by our own parents, who differentiated between being both parent and pal, they recognized the importance of leading by example, being respectful of authority, being law abiding, and not living a life of appearances. Our children need their parents, their parent’s quality time, their parent’s experience, their parent’s adult structure, and their parent’s accumulated knowledge. Not because it’s fun and comfortable but because it’s our JOB!

They need parents, not friends, they have “tons” just check their Facebook!!

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.