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.
…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.
The past few months, the topic of manhood and fatherhood has surfaced in my fieldwork – especially in the wake of the school shootings, and the questions raised in the headlines about the mental health of the young men full of murderous rage.
The absent father in American life is evidenced by an unraveling …
…Kids need to know that in the long run, adversity is not permanent, pervasive or personal. It is a matter of what you believe. “What we believe is more powerful that fear,” Katz said. “And there is nothing more liberating than people around you seeing you as resilient.” He gave the example of WII veterans who view themselves as heroes, and Vietnam veterans who did not, which was largely a matter of how society viewed them.
Jennifer Rodriguez (Photo: courtesy)
An educator, blogger and children’s book author, Jennifer Rodriguez, founded Salice Family Services a non-profit dedicated to help children and families deal with adversity through understanding how to manage stress and build healthy emotional bonds.
In the network, a lie becomes an experience which murders the truth. Why? Because the truth is simple and brings peace, but lies are complex and stir negativity. They attack the individual and disrupt the inner peace.
Lies appeal to feelings which to a large extent make up our experiences. So it is important to teach children to recognize their feelings, and make decisions with their own minds that rely on truth. Let me give you an example from my ancient cyber mom experience.
Joanna (jullien@surewest.net) and her husband have raised two sons in Roseville, CA. She has a degree from U.C. Berkeley in Social Anthropology (corporate culture). Her honors thesis was awarded the Kroeber Prize and funding from National Science Foundation grant. Joanna writes to help parents with the modern-day leadership challenges of raising children. She is a contributing writer for The Granite Bay View, the Press Tribune, the Sacramento Examiner, and editor of Banana Moments.
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