Protecting Their Permanent Record

By Michael

Two teenagers, aged 12 and 13, are in trouble in Indiana for sexting each other. The boy is 12, the girl 13, and the incredibly evenhanded, calm and wise authorities have raised the possibility of felony charges.

(For the record, my solution for child molesters involves sterilization and cremation, not necessarily in that order. However, I believe there is a distinction to be made between a 35-year-old dating a tween and two minors being stupid.)

Part of the idea of coming down hard on the Indiana teens is the deterrent effect. If other students see how serious the penalties are, they will stop sexting each other. Immediately.

But it won’t happen. The teen years are a period of raging hormones, rejection of parental authority and pursuit of position in a peer-based social order. We went through it and so do our children. Our job is to protect them when we’re the wisest people in the world and continue doing so when they don’t seem to hear a word we say.

We know our children. They don’t really have a sense of their own mortality, the dangers of the world or the meaning of long-term. Those insights take time and maturity, which we can’t give them soon enough to keep them from certain childish errors.

Whether it’s sexting or e-mail or MySpace walls, it’s too easy to send out the irretrievable. What creative ways can we find to rein in this proclivity before it becomes a habit?

Here’s a thought I haven’t tried, but it seems to have potential. After having a talk about internet and behavior and the way you can’t take it back after you’ve sent it out, show your child a picture or drawing or something on a small piece of paper. Maybe it’s a picture they find mildly embarrassing for one reason or another.

Make 500 copies of that piece of paper. Hide copies in their socks, insert into a roll of toilet paper in their bathroom, tape it to the back of the door, hide it in a favorite book, put it into a cereal bowl or cereal box….basically hide them everywhere.

After they’ve found the first 100 or so, have that talk again about internet/e-mail/text immortality. Let them know they’ll still be finding more of these reminders, because you don’t remember where all of them are and couldn’t find them if you tried. Perhaps this experience would deliver a permanent insight and caution that no lecture could offer.

What ideas have you considered to prepare your children for their teenage years? What are you doing now to make those lessons relevant when the howls of their new herd drown out your voice?

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Michael Rosenbaum is 5 Minutes for Parenting’s first dadblogger. He is a business consultant, playwright and author of Your Name Here: Guide to Life.

Michael blogs on life issues at Your Name Here Guide to Life and manages the Adult Conversation discussion group on Linked-In.