This morning Banana Moments Foundation, a Roseville non-profit education center to strengthen parent and child trust bonds in a cyber-powered world, hosted a symposium on teaching youth to know their own worth. The symposium took place at the headquarters of Living Smart Foundation, a non-profit youth financial literacy and employment center in Carmichael. Marie Hall, founder of LSF, was one of the featured speakers who explained self worth as the engine of prosperity. “When I teach youth about financial literacy, I don’t start off by talking about money,” she said. “I teach to the psychological aspect of money – the beliefs, desires and values that impact decisions about earning, spending and saving.”

Many businesses fail for many reasons, with one of them being because the people that run and work there do not show professionalism in their work, communication, or attitude when they are representing their company or organization while on the job. These people are usually late, look strange and don’t follow through, or they make excuses. It does not matter what sort of business you are in; in order to succeed you must act professionally any time you interact with customers or potential customers. Even if you are an eccentric artist, you still have to act like a businessperson if you want people to give you their money. What makes you seem professional? Here are some thoughts.

If we define citizenship as the quality of an individual's response to membership in a community, then digital citizenship in a free society must incorporate the value of individual liberty and the capacity to “stand alone” at times. So when does being “connected” to the network actually bully the individual to give up independent thought? When the intimidation is so intense that there is only one option: “go along in order to get along”. Eventually independent thought isn’t perceived as an option.

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.”

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 over functioning parent emerges when parenthood is perceived as an “achievement” and we blur the lines between our own life outcomes and those of our children.

No doubt this will be a year to strike a balance between what we must expect of ourselves as individuals and a society. There will be passionate cries for action whether it be more gun control and parental control with regard to the unthinkable things our children can do. And yet it remains that the one thing every parent and child can do is hold ourselves accountable for our individual thoughts and actions. The bully culture encourages us to believe that the power is not within - it is with other people. So it tells us we need to be more controlling of others' actions, or that we are powerless to resist the angry urges to "get even" when we feel wronged. It is quite simply, giving power to insecurity. There can be no peace when we act out of anxiety or fear.

This week I came across a very provocative article in Forbes about the apparent co-dependency between baby boomer parents and their adult children referred to as “entitled Millennials”.  The article pointed out how parents are inextricably linked to children in ways that could be considered micro-managing or “helicopter parenting.”  The author, Maureen Henderson, cited a case where a University of Cincinnati student secured a restraining order against her parents who monitored all her communications and …