Raising Kids With Character

It’s strange to think that one could get nostalgic about the old Commodore computers with their monochromatic screens (my dad was convinced that colour screens were bad for your eyes), but I do have a soft spot in my heart for those old beasts. Who can forget “Digger” and “Frogger” and other similar one-screen games? But the games aside nothing could have been more miraculous than the invention of the blessed “undo” button. I also remember the screech of the dial-up modem, which would disrupt phone calls as the internet crawled at a snail’s pace into your home. This was cutting edge stuff… and it would drive me batty to have to go back.

But one thing about the internet and technology is that my parents and I were woefully unaware of any concepts such as online bullying, sexting, or even triple-x sites. And when I did stumble across that first nasty image I already knew that if I wanted to get away with looking at porn I would have to do little more than erase our browser’s history. I never spoke with my parents about being safe online and guarding my purity because of what I might find on the computer, it probably never crossed their minds.

This brings up an important point though, we are now the parents and if you think that you know all the ways your kids can get into trouble in this digital age you’re kidding yourself. I’m a pretty savvy guy when it comes to technology, social media and the like, but I am astounded every time I hear about a new app that “everyone is using.” What is even more astonishing is that when I respond “Everyone? Come on now…” it actually is every single middle school student who has it on their iPod or other device. I can’t keep up.

As an example of how completely out of the loop I am, I have spent about 18 months away from being directly involved in the middle school ministry at our church and apparently in that time Facebook has become passé and Instagram is the main social platform. Instagram was there before but I always thought it was silly because who communicates almost exclusively through pictures? Apparently just about every kid under 15 on a device.

My son recently turned 13 and was excited to finally have his own Facebook account (yes we made him wait until he was truthfully old enough to have an account), excited that is until he came home and told me that his friends aren’t on Facebook, they are on Instagram. (Boy Facebook was smart when they bought that platform. And no one under the age of 18 is on Twitter. No one.

What is the point? Parents, you need to know where your kids are spending their time. When Snapchat came out (another app I never bought because I thought it was dumb) I told my friend, Mark, that even IF it wasn’t dumb I wouldn’t use it because I knew that Snapchat was probably saving all those images somewhere. And sure enough! Snapchat was storing images. So all those people who thought they could send photos to their friends that would last all of half a minute and then get deleted were suddenly a little pale in the face. (At least those who had sent nasty images and still had a shred of propriety in them.)

If you are exhausted by the pace of technology you just kind of need to get over it if you intend to keep your kids safe. So do a bit of research and most important of all talk to them! We can’t protect our kids from every danger out there but we can equip them to deal with much of it.