This Year: Resolve to Text Your Teen More

As it stands, the teens in our household do not have texting on their phones. Our high schoolers get it from two angles. As a researcher of adolescent social media use, I don't necessarily want them growing up experiencing the cellphone as an extension of their friendship cluster. As an accountant, my wife sees no financial reason to do it.

brad howell

Poor kids - if they ever want to do anything, they pretty much have to pay for it themselves.

However - within boundaries - I do not believe teen texting is bad!

I actually think its a positive trend and a great way for teens to interact with each other when they are not physically present.

It certainly is less disruptive to the family than the days when teens would tie up a land line for hours on end.

Teens need the support that their friendships provide. Texting can be a healthy supplement to that. It works for parents too!

Almost every parent who texts their teens feels closer to them. The majority of teens who text with their parents in turn also feel closer to them.

Teens and parents feeling closer to each other? Sounds like a positive outcome for a counter-intuitive New Year's Resolution...

Is Mr. Bean Really That Funny?

The presence of Mr. Bean was one of a several entertaining highlights in last week's Olympic opening ceremonies. There are those who find him painfully funny and other's who simply dismiss him as British humor. Regardless, Mr. Bean is one of the few characters that is embraced across a wide range of cultures. Why?

Rowan Atkinson has described this character as a 10 year old boy trapped in a grown man's body. 10 year old boys intuitively accept the world at face value. On top of that, this particular 'trapped' boy appears to be fairly introverted and has an aversion to using verbal skills. An adult encountering the world as a 10 year old boy creates a sense of awkwardness that is rather humorous, if not painfully so. This childhood experience is shared across many cultures, even if adulthood has slammed it out of us. This is a life stage experience we tend to forget.

For my friends who either work with pre-teens or find opportunities to engage them online, Mr Bean is worth a second look. There are some adults who expect pre-teens to act like grown ups online and get frustrated when they don't. But the reality is that they can't - they are not adults! If you need a reminder of what the world looks to a 10 year old boy, watch some Mr. Bean sketches - he paints a great caricature of life as a boy in a world that expects more from him!

What's your favorite Mr. Bean moment? Do you see him as a 10 year old?

Don't Step In the Cow Poo!

My parent's were in town this weekend and re-shared a story of a time when my son was about 3 years old and staying with my parents on their cattle ranch. Walking across the cow pasture, Grandma helped avoid the numerous cow pies with a simple warning to watch out for the cow poo. As they zig-zagged across the field, they came to the winter feeding area, one end of which had a rather large mound of cow manure that the tractors had pushed out of the feeding area to clear the ground. What was a fairly disgusting hill to most adults became a Mt. Everest that needed to be conquered in a child's mind. With surprising speed and determination, grandson tore off to climb manure mountain, leaving grandma in the dust with little to stop the horrifying collision of child and poo but a shouting appeal to STOP, DON'T CLIMB THAT HILL!

© Serghei Starus | Dreamstime.com

Whether it was the shrill in grandma's voice, fear of the unknown or the action of an obedient child, forturnately for grandma, her grandson stopped short of becoming a brown ball of muck. Of course, bewildered, he turned to grandma to ask why not, to which the instructive reply came that the hill was in fact a really large pile of cow poo. Confused, my son turned back to the hill of manure, studying it for a moment before asking a simple question of childhood wonder:

"Was that a big cow?"

Experience is a great thing. From experience we gain wisdom, we develop an ability for insight, and we use it to frame an intuitive understanding of what we are experiencing in this world. In fact, everything we experience for the first time is filtered through a mental filter of past experiences that help us form an understanding, or perspective really, of our new reality. This tool of interpretation happens instinctively, we are not overtly aware that we utilize it. Consequently, it is easy to expect others to have the same intuitive sense that we have. It is easy to get frustrated with people who don't seem to get it.

Social media as an expression of human community is fraught with intuitive misunderstandings. The reality is that early and middle age teens do not necessarily have the life experience (and at times the cognitive ability) to interpret the social messages they are experiencing or understand the rippling social consequences of their own postings. Even though it may feel that teens want their space, it is important for adults to be very aware of their kid's social footprint, being available to guide young people away from the piles of poo that are often present on social media postings.

The best way to accomplish this is to walk these social fields together, being ever available both online and off to provide an additional perspective of the manure mountains.

Blessings on the journey!

Brad

Cyber Bullies Fueled By Sarcastic Abilities

Cyber bullying is a popular topic among adults who work with teens, and rightly so, nobody wants to see kids emotionally destroying one another. Its sad, it tugs at our heart and it motivates adults to step in before someone gets hurt. Cyber bullying is a complex issue with multiple levels of motivation mixed in with developmental limitations and inadvertent offenses. One very intentional ingredient though is sarcasm.

As early adolescents begin to think abstractly, the realization sets in that they have an ability to say one thing that implies something completely different. How cool is that! Its like discovering magic, and of course, practice makes perfect...

Give a kid a hammer and everything begins to look like a nail.

© Blotty | Dreamstime.com

Why sarcasm works is because it is a two sided coin. It tears someone else down while it appears to build someone else up. The majority of intentional cyber bullying activity occurs with a group of friends in front of a computer screen. Everyone wants to matter, but young teen girls constantly have their 'do you like me' radar on and this group of friends provide an unwitting audience to their cyber genius. Where off line bullying may end sooner because somebody sees the pain of the victim and eventually has the courage to step in, among more concrete thinking early adolescents, empathy for the victim will not come without intentional prodding. Someone who can think abstractly needs to connect the dots for a younger person who thinks more in the here and now.

Young teens do not intuitively have empathy for a person across a social network.

Educating young people can help, but it will not typically serve as an inhibitor for those who will choose to use sarcasm to cyber bully. Instead, we need to educate adults, equipping households with mental models that allows for adult awareness of and guiding participation with, adolescent Internet activity. Only adults living life online with their teens will help curb such a destructive behavior among early adolescents.

Questions: How have you seen or experienced the use of sarcasm to bully?

What are some ways that adults can be more aware of what teens are doing online?

Hyper-Texting As A Barometer Of Teenage Pain

The American Public Health Association defines hyper-texting as sending more than 120 texts on a typical school day and characterizes these individuals as being primarily lower social-economic, minority females with no father residing at home. The APHA study reports that one in five high school students fall into this category and the risk factors for this group include:

• 40% more likely to have tried cigarettes
• 2x more likely to have tried alcohol
• 43% more likely to be binge drinkers
• 41% more likely to have used illicit drugs
• 55% more likely to have been in a physical fight
• nearly 3.5x more likely to have had sex



INDUSTRIAL BAROMETER
© Christian Draghici | Dreamstime.com




• 90% more likely to have had 4 or more sexual partners

The study then identifies hyper-texting as a new health risk factor.

Clearly there is a positive correlation between hyper-texting and risky behaviors. However, it seems premature to implicate texting as the culprit and not a symptom. Could it be that hyper-texting is more of a barometer of the ongoing abandonment of our youth?  In this case, a key piece of information seems to be overlooked, namely the lack of fathers in the home. 

To me, texting is a way that teens can bring their friendship cluster along with them despite the limitations of space and time. A cluster is a group of friends protecting each other's back and they exist to help teenagers survive in our culture. Cell phones provide ongoing and immediate connection to this cluster, a phenomon I have labeled Floating Entourage. Have you ever asked a teen to turn their phone off and they protest because their friends might need them? That is an example of a Floating Entourage and disconnecting them from that is a threat to their support structure. Hyper-texters are a great example of this.

What these teens are lacking is paternal (father) experiences in their life. Characteristics of this type of support will include trust, communication and closeness as perceived by the teen. No one can replace a father in the home, but everyone can begin developing webs of relationships with these at risk students, slowly becoming a part of their Floating Entourage of support. As you interact with teens, keep alert of those who may be hyper-texters, they especially need adults in their life willing to have no other agenda but to be there for the student.

To read the study directly, click here
APHA

Keep loving on the students in your life,
Brad

Hunger Games: Teens Killing Teens For The Enjoyment Of Self-indulgent Adults

Putting aside whether this movie is a protest against the 1% or the inevitable outcome of socialism, for those of us that believe the life stage of adolescence exists and is getting longer because youth are left to navigate their journey to adulthood alone, this movie serves as a commentary on adolescent abandonment.

Due to an uprising that was squelched by the high-tech Capital, the 12 remaining districts that make up Panem are forced to offer as tribute their greatest resource - the generation of tomorrow - one male and one female between the ages of 12-18. Along with 22 others, these two teens are forced to fight in a gladiator meets Survivor epic battle to the death. The last living tribute is crowned victor.

Adult masses play two distinct roles in the film. The vast majority are worker drones so beaten by the political system that they are a shadow of humanity, powerless to care for the youth in their lives. Their world is grey, bleak, hopeless. The other adult crowds are the self-indulgent masses, the uncritical consumer feeding an insatiable appetite for entertainment. Though their world is full of color and creativity, it merely serves to mask their pasty existence. In this part of the adult world, there are no teens in the crowds,  adolescents have no space and little interaction with adults except for that which has been set aside to prepare them as entertainers. The crowds stand by, either indifferent or helpless until finally, at one awful moment in the film, the anger and pain become catalyst for a quickly squelched riot. The Games adapt to maintain the balance, and the crowds are quickly distracted.

The leading characters of youth in the film are portrayed as fatherless, left to provide for each other and forced to remind grown-ups to act like adults. Their mentor is a jaded drunk who originally counsels the teens to accept their fate. Their only hope before and during the Game is to depend on themselves and master the art of playing to adults to acquire the necessary resources for survival. In this world, even love becomes suspect as adult manipulation to secure necessary ends. The best any adult who cares for these teens can do is offer advice, provide props that might help win adult favor and offer good luck. "May the odds ever be in your favor".

The books and now this movie are being embraced by teens and it seems doubtful this is due to any social economic message. Somehow it speaks to their experience of abandonment even as it seems like a caricature to adults.  An apocalypse may not serve as the background setting of our culture, but that aside, are we really all that different? Adults in our world are highly stressed, seemingly living either at the edge of exhaustion or the brink of financial disaster. In this world, the home becomes enclaves of escapism and altars of entertainment while physically shared and public interactive space for youth and adults continue to be reduced in gathering spaces like our work, churches and vacations. Consider the Internet, where the vast majority of teens are active apart from any significant adult guidance and interaction, yet we expect 13 year olds to use social media as if they had adult abilities and wonder why 16 year olds post risky online content seemingly oblivious to any social consequence. In this culture, the virtual world becomes a natural place for teens to connect with their friends, allows them ongoing and immediate support, and on occasion can be a tool used to destroy one another.

From the perspective of our youth, are we really all that different?