I make no comparisons, draw no parallels.
Others are free to make of this what they will, this is a simple story of a Mom, a Dad, a Daughter and the electronic world we now live in.
No animals were harmed in the making of this Diary
I am fifty one years old. My beautiful wife will be forty soon, and I don't think she much cares. Her eldest daughter, my step-daughter is that awkward age, somewhere between six and thirty. I would like to ground her until she actually is thirty, which would save me the task of cleaning the guns when potential boyfriends call, and, incidentally, save me the expense of actually buying the guns so I can be cleaning them when ...
When we, and I suspect many reading this, were kids, we had so much less to worry about. Tell your parents everything they wanted to hear, and nothing you didn't want them to know. Try to be a decent member of the human race, don't tell lies, then go out and experiment. Try stuff, learn from others and sometimes learn the hard way oh .... and never let your parents talk to your teachers.
That was about it. If you wanted to get drunk at sixteen, get laid at the same time even though you learned that the two really don't mix .... well we were pretty much free to do all that without much in the way of hassle from the Olds. Heck, we didn't even have to worry about AIDS, it hadn't been invented.
What we had was privacy. All we need do was make sure nothing was written down and we were pretty much free to go about our business unhampered. That was then.
That isn't me harking back to some imagined "Golden Age" that didn't really exist. That was how it was, and in some ways I regret the passing of that amount of anonymity.
My daughter is twelve years old. She has Facebook, and now a cellphone. We finally gave in when she joined Band (she really is very good on that sax) and would be needing to keep in touch more than she has up to now.
She lives in the Electronic world and it isn't new to her, it is all she has ever known. I shudder to think what she might write, if she ever feels the need to write this Diary forty years from now. In the immortal words of Bob Johnson, she may indeed think it onto the screen.
Today Facebook and Text Messages bit her in the ass. Well those and another parent who apparently prefers the teen drama to behaving like an adult.
The girls use Facebook in a typical teen way, and I don't pretend to understand why, except to say that they appear to use it as a "bonding" thing, almost a private language that they seem to find fun. They are all "married" to each other. They swap names, they have their own "girl talk" which I am not privy to, and don't want to be. I am happy with my daughter and I trust her, we both do.
When she is proud of something she shares it with us, when she is down, and they all are at times, we stoop, and with as much tenderness as we can, we raise her up. It's what we do and it's no big deal because it's simply what we signed up for when we had kids. It's being a Mom, and a Dad.
This other Dad, father of a friend, overheard a childlike conversation about "lesbian friends", put eight and three together and made a very unhelpful six, then proceeded to share his concerns with the father of another girl. I might add here that he was so "concerned" that he waited a week, but still the damage has been done.
The resultant uproar has involved three families, and no one is happy.
This is an inside joke between twelve/thirteen year olds that has had grown-ups, and I use that word advisedly, running around like headless chickens over not very much, as far as I can tell.
So tonight we had a chat with the daughter.
We asked her to tell us what was said, and by whom. She was open, upfront and honest which we believed at the time, but which we also confirmed by her offering to show us her texts, and us seeing her Facebook anyway, because we are her "friends". What is it about kids? Why on earth do they want their parents to "friend" them on Facebook? Do they have two accounts and we only get to see the sanitized version? I digress.
So we told our daughter that we were very proud of her, and we love her very much, and we told her a lot more.
We explained about the Internet. We covered the fact that NOTHING you commit to electronic media is secret or private. We suggested to her that she think very carefully before she sends anything, email, texts, Facebook messages. They are not secure, they are not private and she would be best to only ever send things that she would be happy to defend later.
She gets it. She understands that if she sends a bitchy text, then all it takes is one person to fall out with her and the whole damned school gets that text. Same goes for pictures and emails.
She understands now that it only needs one idiot adult to bring his own anxieties to the party, and three good friendships are put in jeopardy.
She is up to speed that her Mom and I teach her to think for herself, and to speak her mind. She also understands that makes her a bit unusual among her peers, many of whom wait until Sunday to be told what they should think.
We apologised for making her life a bit more difficult at this stage, but she will be better placed as an adult if we equip her to make sound decisions for herself. Meanwhile she needs to be more careful about too much "free expression" in public. That bit isn't necessarily related to this incident. She can't be expected to make accommodations for adults who never quite grew past High School.
The kids don't have the privacy we had. They seem generally to be accepting of the new age they live in, because it's their age, not ours. I still think they lost something along the way, but maybe they gained too, in ways I can't even imagine.
Gorgeous daughter understands now that electronics are forever. That pictures, email etc do not disappear, they sit there waiting and they will come back to make your life difficult, unless you don't send them.
We talked too about values. The old ones are still the best ones. Don't tell lies. You will always be in more trouble for lying that you would have been for the original offence. That's as true today as it ever was.
And to my daughter .... We have your back kid.