…According to Lee, the purpose of communication is so we can be seen, heard, loved and valued. Yelling, as a strategy, conveys the opposite. It doesn’t serve any real purpose and it does not signal that you treasure or respect your children either.

For digital natives, children born after 1990 who cannot imagine the world without WWW connectivity, authority is a relational experience. In previous generations, authority was ascribed to structure, such as a title like parent, teacher or president.

It is true that under the right circumstances and the wrong thinking, we are any of us capable of anything. In the network, this couldn’t be truer. As one teenager put it, “Everything is situational.”

April is Distracted Driver Awareness Month and a couple of weeks ago Allstate and the National Safety Council sponsored an event at the Jean Runyon Theater in Sacramento to help parents understand their pivotal role in teaching teens to be safe drivers. The event featured Second City comedy skits and helpful insights from John Ulczycki, Vice President of Strategies for The National Safety Council…

…The anticipation of Google Glass inspired preemptive legislation in West Virginia to make it illegal to wear the Google fashionable mobile device while driving, as reported in Hands Free Info a few days ago.

God bless MSNBC news anchor, Melissa Harris-Perry, for speaking her mind declaring children as belonging, not parents and families, but to the collective who should also educate them. I do respect her point of view, and I am grateful that she put her belief out there so that what she really meant cannot be mistaken.

This statement and her attempts to recast it can serve as a rally point for truth and healing the American parenting culture which suffers from surrendering our inherent God-given authority to be the parent.

Blind spots are the stuff about our children’s lives that we cannot experience or know unless we are open to receiving data about our children, from sources other than our own children that in most cases does not conform to our expectations.

There always have been blind spots in parenting.

However, the advent of the Internet and the mobile phone transformed the dynamics for communications with societal implications that leveled hierarchies at work and home; the model for formal authority that was once tied to social structure (position) carries less significance than it did for previous generations. Titles like “president”, “teacher” or “parent” carry less inherent authority. In a flat world, where hierarchies are traded for networks, authority is more related than ascribed.

Blind Spots are the aspects of our children’s and students’ lives that we cannot see. We are not present 24X7 and we don’t see all aspects of our children’s lives and how they behave in all circumstances. The popular culture, especially cyber communications via texting and social media, cultivate and inspire ideas and behavior that suggest to children there are “no limits”. All the while we parents & teachers may be operating on beliefs, assumptions and anxieties that engage our blind spots rather than helping our child to become a better learner.

This talk explores how parents and teachers can partner to overcome blind spots.

…In this networked environment, there are three realms of security:

Physical (our person and belongings, home and car)
Cyber (smart phones/social media and other applications)
Hearts and minds (beliefs, values, emotions)

Fear sometimes keeps us hyper-focused on the physical and cyber realms of security because it makes us feel like we are in control. And yet the most important part of cyber parenting is engaging hearts and minds of children so they can be self-governing in the network culture. Below are some of the problems with fear-based parenting:

In this “it is all about me” world of texting and social media, children can know way too much for their own good. More importantly, they are easily conditioned to keep the parent out of the equation when they are searching for answers and they risk becoming lost in the faulty-thinking of peer communities that frankly do not respect the individual.

By my definition, an “ancient cyber mom” was able to control Internet and media access via a computer and/or television stationed somewhere in the home. When the mobile phone hit the home front circa 2004 – that is when things really changed.