The Guilty Parent

If I’ve ever given the impression that I know everything about being a mom, then you haven’t been reading long enough to see how I screw it up on an hourly basis. The Twitter hashtag #momfail was created with me in mind, I’m sure.

Along those lines if I’ve ever led you to believe that I’m giving my daughter my blessing to have sex when she becomes a teenager, think again. I know I’ve talked A LOT about it, both on this site and at Lifetime Moms but that’s because I passionately believe that without education and the ability to communicate with our teenagers about sex, we’re pulling the covers over our head and pretending that it doesn’t exist. (more…)

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A recent Twitter conversation with an old friend reminded me of why I’m glad I don’t helicopter or push the kids more than I do. It’s not for a lack of wanting them to succeed, I do. But I feel more and more every day that our kids are under enough pressure to be successful on their own so why should I add to it?

If that makes me a slacker mom, then bring it on.

The core of our conversation rotated around our two oldest children. I was looking for some information on the best way for my teen to get into video gaming; writing about it, reviewing games, etc. He’s considering being a game designer when he’s older and is just now starting to ask what he might do that would be fun, but helpful to him. So I asked my friends on Twitter.

My suggestion to him was start a blog about video games, computer games and the like. Get into the web 2.0 space and start learning from the people already out there.

My friend’s suggestion was to find him courses in Math, English, and Japanese.

Really? My goodness. The boy barely has body hair and we’re already looking at courses for the future. I just picked up his 8th grade class schedule today!

At any rate, my friend and her daughter are already planning for her Master’s degree. The girl is only 10 months older than my son.

This is where I take pause and try to remember that our kids will likely be facing a tougher job market than we did. We were graduating when the market was good, people were buying, selling and our economy looked all bright and shiny like new penny. So it makes some sense to want to have them prepared.

While my friend is positive that she’s not pressuring or pushing her daughter, I still wonder what would happen if I took the same standpoint in my own house.

Mass. Revolt.

So while I’m a slacker and dead set on NOT pushing or pressuring my kids to grow up and move out tomorrow, I’m also conflicted. They have a much harder world than we did (and my parents and their parents and so on) but they also have more options. More avenues that they can explore.

But the pressure is on. It’s there. And maybe that makes me an even worse mom for not sitting down this young man who’s voice cracks on every other word he speaks right now, and start looking at colleges and exploring his options.

After all, my friend’s motivation for getting her daughter ready now is that she doesn’t want her kid to be 24, living on her couch and attending college part time. I don’t either but I refuse to believe that all these decisions need to be made now, or in a year from now.

Can’t we just let them grow up first? At 13 and 14, many teens can’t even choose what they want for breakfast or decide what to wear and here we are expecting and figuring out what’s going to happen to them four or five years from now.

Maybe some teens are that driven and ready to get on with the future but for others, I expect that there is as much confusion about the present as there is the future.

Rather than prepare and plan for them, I feel we should spend some time solidifying our bonds with them. I don’t always have clean socks for them, dinners might be thrown together at the last minute, and we’re not gathering college guides by the truckload but we’re talking about what is mattering to him right now; girls, school, friends, and yes, video games.

I’ll tackle the future… in the future.

image credit: brokenarts

I haven’t been feeling well lately so my bed and television have become my BFFs this past week.

Which of course meant a chance to catch up on the daytime TV.

Aside from catching up on my favorite soaps and a healthy dose of Noggin and Sprout with Peanut, I caught Friday’s Oprah and the revisit with Dr. Laura Berman.

I know you will remember how in April, Jennifer posted about why she would never watch Oprah again. I loved her post even though I respectfully disagree with some parts of her post. So to watch this episode on Friday with two teens who claimed to “be ready” to have sex with each other,

credit: geo cristian

was not so much an eye opener, as it was a breath of fresh air and an affirmation of how I feel about talking to my kids about sex (and now my teenage son).

I mean lets get real, kids are going to have sex, despite the preaching of abstinence and telling kids not to do it (I believe Bristol Palin is a prime example of why that doesn’t work). I was (cover your eyes and ears if you don’t want to see mom and dad), 16 when I had sex for the first time. It wasn’t awful but it wasn’t fabulous either. It would take a few more years and sexual experiences for me to finally get comfortable with sex, my own body, my own sexuality and the power I had as a woman. It’s astonishing to me that we aren’t talking to our kids.

Was I talked to about sex growing up? Yes… and No. The REAL TALKS came after I was having sex and they came from my father. (shocked yet?) I give my dad HUGE PROPS for talking to me (I think it was a year after I had sex for the first time). Did he want to? *snort* Probably not! I’m sure he would have been thrilled to never have that discussion but he did it. I gained so much from that strained, awkward, and challenging discussion in our tiny kitchen. He never went to the topic of self stimulation (I think that would have been the end of him right then and there!) but we talked about being safe, making good decisions and he opened the door for me to say a few things that I had been thinking.

I don’t think that my soon to be 10 year old daughter is ready to learn about self pleasure and gratification either so I’m waiting on that. However, thanks to a young female family member and a few sleepovers away from me, she has learned a few things about sex and where babies come from. I found all of this out recently and at first I was enraged that this very personal conversation had taken place. I was beside myself with anger that the talk that I wanted to have with her had been taken from me. It took all I had to not go through the roof. Going through the roof would have gotten me nowhere so I calmed myself and talked to Bebe about what she knew and what she learned from her older, and not so much wiser female family member.

The details aren’t important, but I did learn that there is still power in talking to your child. Bebe knows that some of the information she got was incomplete at best. She knows that in time, when her body and mind are ready she will be able to have a baby too, and she now knows that this information I’ve given her, the correct information, is for her ears only. It’s not her place to share it with friends or her brothers. I’ve given her the gift of saying it’s OK to ask questions and learn more. It’s OK to want to understand about your body and what it can do. I’ve also given her the information that not everything she hears is correct.

Back to Dr. Berman and Oprah; I’m glad they are having these shows. Times have changed. It’s ridiculous to expect our children to remain innocent forever and it’s our moral obligation as parents to talk to them about what’s happening to their bodies and their minds when they become teenagers. Just because we are educating them does not mean we’re giving them license to go out and have sex. BUT at least they have the correct information, they have the whole story (as Dr. Berman took Courtney through the entire thought process of what could happen after sex including what does staying together a long time really mean to her and her boyfriend).

Kids grow up faster today than they ever have. Peer pressure and information from peers is not only the norm but it takes the place of parental supervision for a lot of teens. I’m not about to stick my head in the sand and pretend my kids won’t turn into sexual beings. I’d like to think I’d be as realistic as Pierce’s mom (the young man on Oprah’s show). If it were my daughter or son, I would (and will) take them to buy the protection that they need too.

I’d like to think my kids will wait until they are married to have sex but in case they aren’t…

I know that not all of you are going to agree with me here. I don’t expect that (let the hate mail begin). This is a sensitive and highly controversial topic, but if you have kids, at one point or another you’ll have to make a choice about the discussions you have and the knowledge they need so I think it warrants talking about now. I was lucky that I had a proactive parent in my life, who has much as it pained him to see me grow up, he didn’t stick his head in the sand.

As I said earlier, I learned a lot from my dad in that very awkward discussion but the most important thing I learned was exactly how much he cared for my well being and safety to suck up his own embarrassment and reservations about teenage sex to have an open and honest talk with me.

That’s the same thing I want my kids to learn from me.

I just read Brandy Ellen’s post on tracking your teen. Video tracking??? What the… ????

Sorry, I didn’t even know that was possible! If my parents had done that to me I would have been furious. I take that back. I’d still be furious.

There are things you just don’t do. You don’t read other people’s email. You don’t record your grown brother’s phone conversations, and you don’t video tape your teen while they’re driving.

My husband and I had the privilege of attending Ford Motor Company’s 2010 Model Year Drive event where we met several of the engineers who have worked on safety features for the 2010 product line. I was impressed with all kinds of features, but when asked if I’d seen the My Key yet I had to admit, I’d never even heard of it. The engineer quickly got us into a My Key equipped car and showed us how it works. He then shared some of their reasoning behind it, including survey results from their studies.

My Key is NOT a tracking device. It does not alert parents to bad behavior or record when your teen doesn’t wear his seat belt. My Key simply allows a parent to program one of the car keys to tell the car not to allow media/radio features unless the front seat belts are buckled. The parent can also set a top speed of 80mph, turn on Traction Control settings (as opposed to only having them turn on when the car thinks it needs them) to keep teens from spinning out, and a max volume for radio can be set at 44%.

These features are all optional and can be changed by the parent at any time. The idea is not to track or take power away from the teen, but to keep them safe. Sure, the teen can still drive without his seat belt fastened, but he won’t get to listen to his music. And, yes, he can still go over the speed limit and get a ticket, he just can’t go over 80mph.

When Ford was working on this safety technology they polled parents and teens alike…

MyKey is appealing to parents of teen drivers, including 75 percent who like the speed-limiting feature, 72 percent who like the more insistent safety-belt reminder, and 63 percent who like the audio limit feature, according to a recent Harris Interactive Survey conducted for Ford.

About 50 percent of those who would consider purchasing MyKey also said they would allow their children to use the family vehicle more often if it were equipped with the new technology. The added seat time can help teens build their driving skills in a more controlled setting, complementing graduated licensing laws that give young drivers more driving freedom as they get older.

More than half of parents surveyed worry that their teen-age children are driving at unsafe speeds, talking on hand-held cell phones or texting while driving, or otherwise driving distracted. More than a third of parents also are concerned that their teens do not always buckle their safety belts when driving.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), teens are more likely to take risks such as speeding – a contributing factor in 30 percent of all fatal crashes. Teens also are less likely to wear safety belts than older drivers.

Teens surveyed by Harris said they are largely open to MyKey if it means they will have more freedom to drive. Initially, 67 percent of teens polled said they wouldn’t want MyKey features. However, if using MyKey would lead to greater driving privileges, only 36 percent would object to the technology.
– Full Article on media.ford.com

Ford’s engineer said because GPS systems are built into so many cars it would be easy to integrate GPS tracking for parents to keep an eye on their kids. So, they ran polls for that feature as well. He said even the parent’s survey results were overwhelmingly against tracking their kid’s driving habits via GPS. They felt actually tracking their kids basically said “we don’t trust you,” and that’s not something our teens need. Ford listened and has no plans to integrate GPS tracking.

I want to teach my son to drive responsibly, but I also want him to have some privacy and freedom. I believe My Key would be an acceptable choice for our family, granted we’ve got years to go before we have to worry about having a teen driver in the house!

I will start by admitting my children are no where near the teenager days, however, I do watch the news daily and have heard of many new tracking devices that allow a parent to “track” their teens every moment they are out driving in their car. I completely understand the maternal instinct of wanting to ensure your child is always safe, however, this is the real world you want your children to live in and so I am a firm believer of teaching your children to learn from the mistakes they may make along the path of growing up.

It seems many parents are nervous about allowing their new teen the freedom to spread their wings and live a little. Companies have also figured out they can make money off of these nervous parents and have created numerous GPS tracking devices that go as far as to provide video of your teen while in the vehicle driving.

The GPS tracking device is one thing, literally video taping your child while they are driving – now don’t you think that would make them more nervous? I was a teen driver once and I did things my parents may or may not have approved of, although not illegal, my parents still would have been really upset with me. If I had a video in my face while driving down the road, I would be constantly double thinking every little movement I made and this would make me a worse driver than if the video was not there.

The whole point behind growing up and becoming an adult is to allow your child to spread their wings and get a taste for the real world.  By purchasing and installing a device that literally monitors the every movement your child makes you are allowing the child to grow up too sheltered. From experience, when you raise a sheltered child they grow up to be far worse off than if you had allowed them to trip up a little bit back in the teen days when it would not have mattered as much.

I get it, really I do. Teen driving statistics taken from Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Associations website state that “16 year olds have higher crash rates than drivers of any other age”,  “drivers age 15-20 accounted for 12.9 percent of all the drivers involved in fatal crashes and 16 percent of all the drivers involved in police-reported crashes in 2006″, and “more than half (56 percent) of young drivers use cell phones while driving”. I get it, the stats are against 16 year old drivers, but did you raise your child to be morally conscious? Did you raise your child in a loving environment full of trust and open communication? If you answered yes, then you have already started your child on the path of driving success.

I am a firm believer that if you are truly raising your children to have the moral standards you wish to instill in them such as honesty, integrity and trust then you have no reason to install some video monitoring device into their vehicle. Installing a device that will record your child while driving is not only a distraction while out on the road, it is telling them that you do not trust them to make educated, morally just decisions on their own.

You can stop feeling guilty because you do not wish to purchase these crazy video devices that do not provide the room to grow your children so deserve. Sit back, relax, and worry from home like the parents in the good old days did, then when your child arrives home safely from their day or night out, talk to them, discuss any situations that may have occurred, appreciate that  your child is responsible enough to hold a state drivers license.

Written by: Brandy from Happily Blended

Image credit: Rchard Simpson