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Posted
Monday, October 29, 2007 4:47 PM
| By
Rachael Larimore
Wow, I take a couple days off and all heck breaks loose on the teen sex front. I have to agree with Melinda that there is a vast middle ground that is being missed up in Portland, Maine. What have they got against parents up there, anyhow?
One thing that I find interesting from reviewing the posts on the subject is that all of us who support the idea of calling parents at least sometimes are … parents. For better or worse, having children changes your perspective. When I was in high school and college, I always said, “I’m going to be one of the cool parents. If my kids want to drink, I’ll let them do it at home. And I’ll give them birth control, and …” you get the picture. Now that I have children, I’m trying to figure out where I can snap up some GPS-enabled ski jackets. (And they certainly won’t be going to summer camp.)
Just kidding on the ski jackets. But it raises an interesting point. On the one hand, we're better able to keep track of our kids with cell phones and other gadgets, and the concern is we're not letting kids be kids. On the other hand, they're not acting much like children if they're having sex at age 12. But I suspect that some parents use "helicoptering"—knowing where kids are at every moment, signing them up for every activity under the sun to keep them busy and then attending every practice—as a substitute for actual involved parenting. Why, who needs to talk to Suze and Johnny about sex when you know they're not having it, because their RFID tag tells you they're at the mall like they said they would be. (Too bad that unless you're Jack Bauer and can upload the mall schematics to your cell phone, you won't know if they're at the movies or in the broom closet.)
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