As the parent of a 13-year-old girl who loves LMFAO and Nikki Minaj and all the other appalling purveyors of modern “culture,” I can tell you that it has been disturbing and eye-opening.
I asked her how many of her 7th grade female classmates have already lost their virginity, and she counted nine (wouldn’t give names though). I asked her how many are cutting and doing drugs, and the number was about the same. I asked her to describe what a Venn diagram would look like in terms of the intersection of kids who had lost their virginity, were doing drugs, and were cutting — and to my surprise, it wasn’t just the same nine girls doing all three things.
Nowadays, kids can go on to a social networking website called omegle.com, where you can “talk to strangers.” The kids can either do online text or video chat. I went on the site for five minutes just to see what it was about. I had my camera on, but blocked, so I couldn’t be seen. But I can tell you what I saw, which is that at least half the “strangers” are boys in their teens and twenties who masturbating to the camera, and also there were couples actively having sex.
A 13-year-old girl logged on to omegle will see more penises in five minutes than most women in my own peer group (I’m in my early 60s) have seen in their whole lives. And there is no practical way to stop kids from visiting these kinds of sites if they want to, since they all have access to computers, ipods and smart phones. And even if you want to deprive your kid of such gadgets, which is completely impractical nowadays, they still can have access through their friends’ gadgets.
Two nights ago, I was in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood in Boston, and stopped at a red light was a car with its windows rolled down blasting a hip-hop “song” at a volume that could be heard throughout the neighborhood. The “lyric” was a repetitive phrase: “Where my bitches at?”
I’m starting to feel like Michael Douglas in that movie “Falling Down.”
The only consolation is that kids today — even good kids — are so inundated with graphic and explicit sexuality that you don’t have to mince words with them when it comes to explaining values and talking frankly with them about lifestyles, choices and consequences.
I love that movie. It speaks to me. I often say that I grew up in a country very far away from the one I'm now living in. Has there ever been a society that has undergone such a drastic change in only 2 generations?
Religious school from an early age perhaps.
You can put the computer in a communal room and/or just not let your child have one. Ditto for cell phones, ipods, and so on.
Hard for the kids, but better than letting them get raped (physically or mentally) by seeing, talking, and/or meeting up with someone online.