Well, tp, as would be expected, another brilliant post! Well done.
However. As a parent, and, moreover, as a parent who has "seen it all", I will continue to err on the side of caution.
Having said that, though, I have been careful to tell the boys WHY they aren't allowed to be on these social groups. I hope we have good communication. If we don't, if I'm wrong, I'm not sure what I could do about it. Tay and I talked about this specific case. He thinks it's "awful", that this girl was bullied and tormented and ended up committing suicide. But he's also quick with words and quick to use words to hit the sore spots, he can be very cutting and sarcastic, and it is entirely possible that he could do some bullying of his own in that way. I don't fear only that he could be a victim, but that he could get caught up in some group thing. Kids do.
His school recently had a touring theatre company present a play about a dreadful murder that happened here a few years ago. A girl named Reena Virk was, at the end of a long horrible saga of misery, beaten and then drowned by a gang of people she longed to belong with. It was a case that caused a furore here, about teens and bullying and unsupervised wild kids, all the usual, and once poor Reena had been dead awhile, and the trials of her murderers were over, people just put it out of sight. The conditions and situations that lead to such tragedies still exist, as do the conditions and situations on the internet that led to Megan's suicide.
People claim, or at least some people do, that we are now "over-protective" of our children. Well, I dispute that. I think, in some hopeful ways, that people are RETURNING to caring for their kids. For a generation or two, parents seemed to think that being a parent was too much trouble, or that actually "raising" your kids was wrong, that kids should be given freedom. Kids don't need freedom, kids need involved and vigilant parents.
How are kids being "over-protected"? What hard struggles are they being "protected" from, supposedly?
Childhood lasts a long time in our society. Maybe too long. But since that's not going to change, I see it as a grave mistake to let young teenagers have too much "freedom".
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Living on Earth is expensive,
but it does include a free trip
around the sun every year.