As a proactive parent, I pay attention to the ideas about parenting that garner a large following. Today, the descriptive phrase attracting both praise and vilification is Tiger-Mothering. It started this past January 8th when the Wall Street Journal published Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior by Amy Chua. The essay was excerpted from Chua’s memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother that was released just three days later and has been ranked in the top five in the non-fiction category by the New York Times for four consecutive weeks now.
I read Chua’s essay with fascination and awe. So many individual lines jumped out at me and inside I would respond with a resounding “Yes!” because her words resonated, especially when she challenged the Western parental tendency to accept mediocrity. I was eager to keep reading to see if I could learn anything I would want to apply and was very curious to understand why her strange-sounding parental rules like not permitting her daughters to ever be in a school play might have some merit.
Early in our parenting days, Amelia and I had found a gold mine of parenting wisdom reading about the parenting practices of another great ancient culture: The Jews*. Perhaps Chinese culture also offered values and practices Amelia and I would want to embrace. Philip’s first semester grades had been a disappointment and perhaps behaving more like Chinese parents was just what Amelia and I needed to reverse the situation.
While I understand that Chua’s complete memoir disclosed Chua questioning her conventional practices from time to time and even easing the pressure on her younger daughter, the essay—which is what everyone has read—yielded no ground. So despite Chua’s noble effort to defend the model she mostly embraces, I am disappointed to report that I found nothing of any true value in Chua’s essay. Instead what I found was what I would describe as counterfeit wisdom. It is counterfeit because it seems so very right unless examined critically. Chua’s so-called wisdom is like the most dangerous lies: the lies that contain a significant amount of truth. Each time a resounding “Yes!” bubbled up inside me when reading Chua’s essay, my passionate agreement was evoked because she was describing a real problem. And her general descriptions of her solution looked very promising. Consider the following paragraph from her essay.
What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.
Standing alone, the above paragraph earns mostly high marks and nearly all parents would do well to heed Chua’s general counsel. The problem exists with what Chua actual means when she uses words like fortitude, properly, tenacious, excellence, excel and confidence. By the end of her essay, the reader knows what Chua actually means and many readers may wonder if Chua’s solution is the most guaranteed way to rise above mediocrity. Some might conclude that it would be better to accept mediocrity. Others might embrace Chua’s recommendations. And there are those already practicing what Chua advocates who will feel validated by her essay and redouble their efforts.
While I have many friends I like and professional colleagues I respect whose upbringing probably closely matches what Chua advocates and who are likewise either practicing or planning to practice these same techniques with their own children, I still can only conclude these practices are wrong. I am not going on the offensive to defend the mediocrity-enabling practices Chua sees as her lone alternative. Instead, I want to present superior solutions to the problems she correctly identifies. So let me begin as Chua herself began.
Chua began her essay by stating “A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids.” While I neither like nor advocate the use of stereotypes, they can be useful in making a point. Chua wants her kids to be successful kids because she believes that successful kids become successful adults. So what is the stereotypical Chinese-parented adult? Is this adult stereotype the model of successful adulthood? Compare that stereotype to the stereotypical Jewish-parented adult. Without hesitation, I would say the latter is far more successful. With a world population that is roughly one percent of world’s Chinese, Jewish-parented adults emerge with greater frequency as leaders across a broad spectrum of professions than Chinese-parented adults.
If one is going to embrace the parenting practices of a distinct culture, Jewish parents run circles around Chinese parents. Ironically, Chua’s husband is Jewish and both have grown up to be successful professionals. The stereotypical Jewish parent is also strict with the goal of raising a successful adult, but it is a very different kind of strictness. Somehow in Chua’s household, two highly intelligent parents selected the conventional Chinese parenting over the conventional Jewish parenting. Clearly, the allure of Tiger-Mothering is high and its supporting arguments are ancient, deep-rooted and like all forms of abuse have great but subtle power.
I am neither Jewish, nor have I embraced all that I have learned about Jewish parenting practices, and I am certainly not trying to raise either Philip or Chloe to resemble a stereotypical Jewish-parented adult. That said, I have embraced many Jewish parenting practices and combined them with other successful parenting practices, common sense and a willingness to do things differently than all the other parents around me.
Unfortunately, a one thousand word rebuttal to Chua’s essay is insufficient, and I value excellence in parenting too much to tolerate such insufficiency. As such, this is the first in a series of rebuttals targeting Chua’s specifics. Beginning with the topic of Motivation, I will clearly state the problem, critique Chua’s proposed solution and propose a healthy effective alternative that any parent willing to put in the effort can implement. Stay tuned.
*The book in question was The Jewish Phenomenon: Seven Keys to the Enduring Wealth of a People by Steven Silbiger.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Monday, January 31, 2011
Parents and Teachers Surf the Social Networks Too
The other evening I indulged Chloe by watching Easy A with her. In it, the movie’s protagonist, Olive, a high school senior girl who is perpetuating a false image that she is promiscuous, is shocked to learn that her favorite teacher Mr. Griffith not only knows about all the rumors circulating about her, but also knows just how pervasive those rumors are. How does Mr. Griffith know so much? Mr. Griffith tells Olive he reads his students’ Facebook posts.
Today, parents and teachers tend to fall into one of two very distinct tribes when it comes to the social networking revolution. There are the cyber-reactive and there are the cyber-proactive. The first group observes little more about their teens and their world than previous generations. The second group observes at least a hundred times more, albeit through a distorted lens. Likewise, teens fall into two very distinct tribes. There are the cyber-dabblers and there are the cyber-broadcasters. And there are many more cyber-broadcasters (especially among teen girls) than one might expect.
In his famous work 1984, George Orwell envisioned that hierarchical totalitarian governments would leverage emerging recording, networking and communications technology to forcibly pull very private details about individuals online for an elite few to observe. Orwell never would have guessed that this technology once mature would actually have the converse effect. Private information is pushed not pulled and the pushing is voluntary not forced. Cyber-broadcasters quickly and efficiently promulgate both gossip and their own very private information. Online, a parent or teacher can easily monitor the pulse of the goings-on among high school students thanks to these cyber-broadcasters.
Orwell’s Big Brother government was clearly doing something unethical because it was observing people’s private lives against their will. In contrast, there has historically never been anything unethical about observing what was broadcast in the public domain. But given how much seemingly private information and gossip one can now observe on social networking sites like Facebook and Formspring, are teachers like the fictional Mr. Griffith and parents like me violating an emerging ethic by proactively observing?
I recently struggled with this question. To be fair, I think there are many teens at Hermes High School who would be as shocked and disturbed as the protagonist in Easy A to discover just how much I have observed about them by simply browsing what they and their peers have disclosed online where I can easily see it. If their parents would object to these teens putting this private information online (as many do) would they likewise object to teachers and other parents reading this private information once it appears in the public domain? A recent interaction made me ask myself these very questions.
There were perhaps fifteen parents including me sitting at a large table at a Hermes High School event for parents of students entering the honors program. We were discussing the social networking revolution, how it was affecting our teens and what we were doing about it. One mother said she permitted her daughter to use social networking sites but required her to friend her mother. Another mother said she required her daughter to give her mother her password. And a third mother told the group she knows and uses her daughter’s passwords without her daughter knowing it. When the topic of Formspring and cyber-bullying came up, yet a fourth mother told the group she did not permit her daughter Oleta to use Formsping.
Yikes, I thought. Whether Oleta’s mother knew it or not, Oleta was a serious cyber-broadcaster who had a very active Formspring account that I browsed from time to time. I discovered Oleta’s Formspring account roughly eight months earlier. The chatter about Erica losing her virginity had just started to die down when Erica worked her way back into the center of online and offline gossip by hooking up with two separate senior guys at the same party. While Erica’s hookups on that evening were tame enough to be filmed for a PG-13 movie, they brought Erica a new wave of notoriety. And with that wave, more detail about that evening’s shenanigans emerged. The same two senior guys also hooked up with a second freshman girl: Oleta. And if that wasn’t enough fuel for gossip to embarrass Erica and Oleta, the scope of the girls’ bad judgment was highlighted further when one of those two senior guys was arrested for a felony just two weeks later.
Erica and Oleta’s Formspring pages lit up with cyber-bullying. Erica shut down her Formspring account for months. But Oleta decided to stay online and fight back. And I was extremely impressed with how Oleta fought back with tenacity, courage and grace. She admitted to exercising bad judgment but also made clear her recreational exploits that evening—though wrong—had been quite tame. Oleta further posted that she believed she had learned a valuable lesson from her own error and hoped others would learn from her mistakes. She seemed to never tire answering each anonymous and signed post to her Formspring account from the most judgmental to the most supportive. And over time Oleta’s efforts seemed to pay off because the supportive posts began to far out-shine the judgmental ones.
I expect it was around a month after the actual hookups when Oleta’s mother saw the posts, experienced her own Yikes moment, learned a little bit about Formspring and then forbid Oleta from using Formspring. But Oleta never actually shut down her Formspring account. Instead she simply went silent for a few weeks. Once she got back on, Oleta resumed her cyber-broadcasting lifestyle. I’ve particularly enjoyed reading Oleta’s posts on Formspring because she’s displayed an unusually high level of depth and insight, and she’s proven in my eyes that it isn’t just in made-for-television movies that a victim of cyber-bullying can emerge stronger and more confident. When chatting with her mother, I could see further evidence of her daughter’s admirable qualities for stepping forward to participate in the honors program.
Oleta and others like her are the reason cyber-proactive parents like me and teachers like the fictional Mr. Griffith see one hundred times more (albeit through a distorted lens) than today’s cyber-reactive and all previous generations. While I wouldn’t advise a teenager to gossip or disclose so much private information online, a lot of it was already out in the open in the traditional gossip-laden public domain of High School. Formspring provided Oleta a way to gain some editorial control of the gossip in a venue where she could defend herself on a level playing field and emerge triumphant.
Since thinking, Yikes and hoping my expression did not give me away at the parent meeting, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am not violating any emerging code of ethics associated with the social networking revolution. If it is online, associated in some way with Hermes High School or my son’s peers and I can get to it by clicking hyperlinks, I will probably read it. If it is relevant or interesting, I will probably remember it. And if it provides an excellent illustrative story to reflect on teen life at this moment in history, I might even publish an anonymous blog post that includes it. On the other side of the equation, I’m teaching Philip and Chloe to be very cautious about what the post online or even text to a friend, because I know I can’t be the only cyber-proactive person out there.
With all that said, not everyone agrees with me. Some would violently disagree. While Oleta’s mother is developing into a very good friend to me and proving she is a great parent to her daughter, I don’t plan to tell Oleta’s cyber-reactive mother that I read her daughter’s online posts any time soon.
Today, parents and teachers tend to fall into one of two very distinct tribes when it comes to the social networking revolution. There are the cyber-reactive and there are the cyber-proactive. The first group observes little more about their teens and their world than previous generations. The second group observes at least a hundred times more, albeit through a distorted lens. Likewise, teens fall into two very distinct tribes. There are the cyber-dabblers and there are the cyber-broadcasters. And there are many more cyber-broadcasters (especially among teen girls) than one might expect.
In his famous work 1984, George Orwell envisioned that hierarchical totalitarian governments would leverage emerging recording, networking and communications technology to forcibly pull very private details about individuals online for an elite few to observe. Orwell never would have guessed that this technology once mature would actually have the converse effect. Private information is pushed not pulled and the pushing is voluntary not forced. Cyber-broadcasters quickly and efficiently promulgate both gossip and their own very private information. Online, a parent or teacher can easily monitor the pulse of the goings-on among high school students thanks to these cyber-broadcasters.
Orwell’s Big Brother government was clearly doing something unethical because it was observing people’s private lives against their will. In contrast, there has historically never been anything unethical about observing what was broadcast in the public domain. But given how much seemingly private information and gossip one can now observe on social networking sites like Facebook and Formspring, are teachers like the fictional Mr. Griffith and parents like me violating an emerging ethic by proactively observing?
I recently struggled with this question. To be fair, I think there are many teens at Hermes High School who would be as shocked and disturbed as the protagonist in Easy A to discover just how much I have observed about them by simply browsing what they and their peers have disclosed online where I can easily see it. If their parents would object to these teens putting this private information online (as many do) would they likewise object to teachers and other parents reading this private information once it appears in the public domain? A recent interaction made me ask myself these very questions.
There were perhaps fifteen parents including me sitting at a large table at a Hermes High School event for parents of students entering the honors program. We were discussing the social networking revolution, how it was affecting our teens and what we were doing about it. One mother said she permitted her daughter to use social networking sites but required her to friend her mother. Another mother said she required her daughter to give her mother her password. And a third mother told the group she knows and uses her daughter’s passwords without her daughter knowing it. When the topic of Formspring and cyber-bullying came up, yet a fourth mother told the group she did not permit her daughter Oleta to use Formsping.
Yikes, I thought. Whether Oleta’s mother knew it or not, Oleta was a serious cyber-broadcaster who had a very active Formspring account that I browsed from time to time. I discovered Oleta’s Formspring account roughly eight months earlier. The chatter about Erica losing her virginity had just started to die down when Erica worked her way back into the center of online and offline gossip by hooking up with two separate senior guys at the same party. While Erica’s hookups on that evening were tame enough to be filmed for a PG-13 movie, they brought Erica a new wave of notoriety. And with that wave, more detail about that evening’s shenanigans emerged. The same two senior guys also hooked up with a second freshman girl: Oleta. And if that wasn’t enough fuel for gossip to embarrass Erica and Oleta, the scope of the girls’ bad judgment was highlighted further when one of those two senior guys was arrested for a felony just two weeks later.
Erica and Oleta’s Formspring pages lit up with cyber-bullying. Erica shut down her Formspring account for months. But Oleta decided to stay online and fight back. And I was extremely impressed with how Oleta fought back with tenacity, courage and grace. She admitted to exercising bad judgment but also made clear her recreational exploits that evening—though wrong—had been quite tame. Oleta further posted that she believed she had learned a valuable lesson from her own error and hoped others would learn from her mistakes. She seemed to never tire answering each anonymous and signed post to her Formspring account from the most judgmental to the most supportive. And over time Oleta’s efforts seemed to pay off because the supportive posts began to far out-shine the judgmental ones.
I expect it was around a month after the actual hookups when Oleta’s mother saw the posts, experienced her own Yikes moment, learned a little bit about Formspring and then forbid Oleta from using Formspring. But Oleta never actually shut down her Formspring account. Instead she simply went silent for a few weeks. Once she got back on, Oleta resumed her cyber-broadcasting lifestyle. I’ve particularly enjoyed reading Oleta’s posts on Formspring because she’s displayed an unusually high level of depth and insight, and she’s proven in my eyes that it isn’t just in made-for-television movies that a victim of cyber-bullying can emerge stronger and more confident. When chatting with her mother, I could see further evidence of her daughter’s admirable qualities for stepping forward to participate in the honors program.
Oleta and others like her are the reason cyber-proactive parents like me and teachers like the fictional Mr. Griffith see one hundred times more (albeit through a distorted lens) than today’s cyber-reactive and all previous generations. While I wouldn’t advise a teenager to gossip or disclose so much private information online, a lot of it was already out in the open in the traditional gossip-laden public domain of High School. Formspring provided Oleta a way to gain some editorial control of the gossip in a venue where she could defend herself on a level playing field and emerge triumphant.
Since thinking, Yikes and hoping my expression did not give me away at the parent meeting, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am not violating any emerging code of ethics associated with the social networking revolution. If it is online, associated in some way with Hermes High School or my son’s peers and I can get to it by clicking hyperlinks, I will probably read it. If it is relevant or interesting, I will probably remember it. And if it provides an excellent illustrative story to reflect on teen life at this moment in history, I might even publish an anonymous blog post that includes it. On the other side of the equation, I’m teaching Philip and Chloe to be very cautious about what the post online or even text to a friend, because I know I can’t be the only cyber-proactive person out there.
With all that said, not everyone agrees with me. Some would violently disagree. While Oleta’s mother is developing into a very good friend to me and proving she is a great parent to her daughter, I don’t plan to tell Oleta’s cyber-reactive mother that I read her daughter’s online posts any time soon.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Formspring: Cyber-Bullying and Cyber-Fighting-Back
I wish I could remember the name of the made-for-television movie that ended with the bullied teenage girl holding the microphone at an all-school assembly defending herself and effectively saying “shame on you” to all the bullies who had harassed her and the many other bullying victims at her school. In the movie, the act served to empower not only the protagonist but also all of the other victims. Today, real-life heroines and heroes who have been victimized by bullies don’t need a school assembly, nor do they need to develop public speaking skills. The victims now have an excellent platform online on which they can defend themselves with valor.
Yes, I am actually talking about Formspring. Youth advocates and the media have been keeping a close watch on Formspring. By allowing users to post anonymous questions and comments to someone’s active Formspring account, a lot of the bullying that once happened offline has moved online and Formspring has become a significant cyber-bullying hub. Across the print and online world, one finds no shortage of writers firing off warnings to parents about the dangers of Formspring and encouraging these parents to protect their tweens and teens from the toxic allure of this emerging social networking jaugernaut.
Formspring has received a significant amount of bad press because it enables cyber-bullying. But there is more going on than merely cyber-bullying. What normally gets missed in these assessments is how Formspring empowers the victims to fight back. This important part of the story is only recently coming to light.
Before I proceed, I am aware that I am at great risk of being misunderstood. So I need to clearly state my position on some key issues. First, all forms of bullying and harassment including cyber-bullying are wrong. Second, teens and tweens need to be educated on just how wrong these behaviors are and how much real damage these behaviors cause. Victims of bullying and harassment suffer greatly and the most vulnerable go as far as committing suicide. Third, laws and school policies are woefully behind in addressing the problems and challenges that emerge as a result of the changes brought on by rapidly emerging technologies such as social networking. There need to be clear punitive consequences for bullying and harassment so that the victimizers will face justice and would-be victimizers will be deterred. And lastly, I realize that some teens and tweens will be so challenged by the online bullying that the empowerment this platform offers cannot offset for them the additional harm it enables their tormentors to inflict.
With that said, I believe most teens are savvier than we give them credit. Reading a recent blog post by Danah Boyd who researches youth online, I learned that Formspring staff now know that “a number of vicious questions were posted by the Formspring account owners themselves.” Is this rare? I don’t think so. Formspring cannot measure this behavior precisely because they can only observe it when the account owners post the “anonymous” messages to their own account when logged in. Logged off, the anonymous messages are even anonymous to Formspring. But the numbers are large enough that Boyd rules out hacking as a reasonable explanation.
It did not take me too long to find my own anecdotal proof of this seemingly self-harassing behavior. On the Formspring page of Brenda, a freshman at Hermes High School, a long raging post degrading her for having “huge, ugly, sagging nipples” appeared. (My version is much, much cleaner than the actual.) However, the person who wrote the post failed to notice that she hadn’t clicked the box to make the raging post anonymous. It was Brenda who wrote the cruel post, answered it and then published it to her own Formspring page.
Why would Brenda or any teen do something like that? Boyd suggests three reasons: A cry for help, a way to look cool, and a way to invite complements. Certainly, there are probably some self-harassers who are publishing such posts as a cry for help. As well, I have certainly observed that any time a teen publishes a particularly derogatory post, favorable posts (most of them not anonymous) soon follow. And lastly, Boyd correctly points out that teens can look quite fly (fly is the new word for cool) simply being un-intimidated enough to publish even the cruelest words that arrive on Formspring.
But I see something deeper. The words Brenda published were carefully crafted. I think they were meant to sound like someone in particular. Perhaps Brenda was even quoting the exact words that had been directed at her in the girls’ locker room. Using the anonymity of Formspring, I think Brenda and others like her e-personate their real or assumed offline tormentors and thereby create a platform where they can defend themselves and effectively say “shame on you” to gossips and bullies who may never have done any actual cyber-bullying. And on Formspring it is there for everyone to see. Brenda might have had even one more item on her agenda. She might have wanted the post to draw boys’ attention to her chest so that they could draw their own conclusions. The point to take away is that Formspring gives account holders (especially savvy, creative teens) a huge amount of power to influence how they are viewed. Account holders can delete the posts they do not want published and answer the posts they do want published, even if they need to author the anonymous posts themselves.
For parents who want to protect their teens and tweens, requiring them to shut down their Formspring accounts may be the right decision or it may merely take away the best defense they have against the gossips and bullies. For most teens and tweens, I think it would be the latter. Merely having a Formspring account is a way for victims like Brenda to say to every bully and would-be bully “bring it on” and in my mind that is pretty darn fly.
Yes, I am actually talking about Formspring. Youth advocates and the media have been keeping a close watch on Formspring. By allowing users to post anonymous questions and comments to someone’s active Formspring account, a lot of the bullying that once happened offline has moved online and Formspring has become a significant cyber-bullying hub. Across the print and online world, one finds no shortage of writers firing off warnings to parents about the dangers of Formspring and encouraging these parents to protect their tweens and teens from the toxic allure of this emerging social networking jaugernaut.
Formspring has received a significant amount of bad press because it enables cyber-bullying. But there is more going on than merely cyber-bullying. What normally gets missed in these assessments is how Formspring empowers the victims to fight back. This important part of the story is only recently coming to light.
Before I proceed, I am aware that I am at great risk of being misunderstood. So I need to clearly state my position on some key issues. First, all forms of bullying and harassment including cyber-bullying are wrong. Second, teens and tweens need to be educated on just how wrong these behaviors are and how much real damage these behaviors cause. Victims of bullying and harassment suffer greatly and the most vulnerable go as far as committing suicide. Third, laws and school policies are woefully behind in addressing the problems and challenges that emerge as a result of the changes brought on by rapidly emerging technologies such as social networking. There need to be clear punitive consequences for bullying and harassment so that the victimizers will face justice and would-be victimizers will be deterred. And lastly, I realize that some teens and tweens will be so challenged by the online bullying that the empowerment this platform offers cannot offset for them the additional harm it enables their tormentors to inflict.
With that said, I believe most teens are savvier than we give them credit. Reading a recent blog post by Danah Boyd who researches youth online, I learned that Formspring staff now know that “a number of vicious questions were posted by the Formspring account owners themselves.” Is this rare? I don’t think so. Formspring cannot measure this behavior precisely because they can only observe it when the account owners post the “anonymous” messages to their own account when logged in. Logged off, the anonymous messages are even anonymous to Formspring. But the numbers are large enough that Boyd rules out hacking as a reasonable explanation.
It did not take me too long to find my own anecdotal proof of this seemingly self-harassing behavior. On the Formspring page of Brenda, a freshman at Hermes High School, a long raging post degrading her for having “huge, ugly, sagging nipples” appeared. (My version is much, much cleaner than the actual.) However, the person who wrote the post failed to notice that she hadn’t clicked the box to make the raging post anonymous. It was Brenda who wrote the cruel post, answered it and then published it to her own Formspring page.
Why would Brenda or any teen do something like that? Boyd suggests three reasons: A cry for help, a way to look cool, and a way to invite complements. Certainly, there are probably some self-harassers who are publishing such posts as a cry for help. As well, I have certainly observed that any time a teen publishes a particularly derogatory post, favorable posts (most of them not anonymous) soon follow. And lastly, Boyd correctly points out that teens can look quite fly (fly is the new word for cool) simply being un-intimidated enough to publish even the cruelest words that arrive on Formspring.
But I see something deeper. The words Brenda published were carefully crafted. I think they were meant to sound like someone in particular. Perhaps Brenda was even quoting the exact words that had been directed at her in the girls’ locker room. Using the anonymity of Formspring, I think Brenda and others like her e-personate their real or assumed offline tormentors and thereby create a platform where they can defend themselves and effectively say “shame on you” to gossips and bullies who may never have done any actual cyber-bullying. And on Formspring it is there for everyone to see. Brenda might have had even one more item on her agenda. She might have wanted the post to draw boys’ attention to her chest so that they could draw their own conclusions. The point to take away is that Formspring gives account holders (especially savvy, creative teens) a huge amount of power to influence how they are viewed. Account holders can delete the posts they do not want published and answer the posts they do want published, even if they need to author the anonymous posts themselves.
For parents who want to protect their teens and tweens, requiring them to shut down their Formspring accounts may be the right decision or it may merely take away the best defense they have against the gossips and bullies. For most teens and tweens, I think it would be the latter. Merely having a Formspring account is a way for victims like Brenda to say to every bully and would-be bully “bring it on” and in my mind that is pretty darn fly.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Boys Pick Up Where the Medications Leave Off
With the exception of a few polite greetings, I have never personally interacted with Philip’s peer, Ophelia. But I have interacted a lot with Ophelia’s mother. Ophelia’s mother is part of my extended network of proactive parents in the greater Hermes area. Among those she trusts, Ophelia’s mother openly discloses Ophelia’s basic struggles on both a short-term and long-term basis and occasionally provides specific details.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Inspired to Connect the Past to the Present
Back in September, I started a new job with a new company. I went from primarily working out of my home office in Hermes to working at my new company’s regional office in Riverdale. It is a fifty minute commute. The office building is walking distance from the shops and restaurants in historic downtown Riverdale and even closer to an office building where I worked for six years when Philip was a small child.
The other day I walked past that old office building during my lunch break. There was my former office’s window looking down at me: Second floor, second window from the left. I could see the shade was lowered about one third of the way. My former company had been sold to a larger corporation and operations had been scattered to other locations. Someone I probably did not even know now occupied my former abode. The art work that once occupied the walls inside that office was now hanging from the wall of my home office in Hermes. Still, the second window from the left on the second floor looked virtually unchanged. It was enough to fill me with a flood of memories from that time.
The old company had relocated me and my family from another state to San Geraldo in order for me to work there. That six year job stint took me from the days when Philip couldn’t even pronounce his own name to the first half of his second grade year of elementary school. It included Chloe’s birth and the first three years of her life as well as our move from San Geraldo to Hermes. So much had been packed into a little more than half a decade.
It is funny what memories take hold for us to cherish. For me, one such memory dates back to Philip’s early days in preschool. I had taken the train to work that day. Young Philip loved trains. “Twain – twain,” he would say pointing whenever he spotted one. Amelia had plans to have dinner with a friend in Oxford Hills. We decided she would take Philip to my office for me to bring home. It would be his first chance to actually ride on a train.
Philip and Amelia arrived in the late afternoon. The train home would arrive forty minutes later. I wanted to make Philip’s rare visits to my office special. On that day I began two rituals which I would repeat each time he visited my office for the rest of the time he was in preschool. First, I took him to the office kitchen for a can of root beer from the refrigerator. Going forward, “Rooph Beer” was all he would get to drink in my office and we refrained from serving it to him in any other venue. The other ritual was drawing a picture. With my green highlighter pen and copy paper, I would draw “Dexter the Dragon” which was a children’s ride at the San Geraldo Zoo. Those rituals played out on perhaps twenty visits to my office over the next two years, always at Philip’s request. During some of those visits, Philip would get to ride the twain again.
Walking through downtown Riverdale the other day was an experience somewhere between stepping through a time portal and getting a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past. Some things looked exactly the same. There was still the hair salon run by an extended Vietnamese family that provided a fantastic men’s haircut for a fantastic price. Two coffee shops, two Irish pubs, two Thai restaurants and an upscale deli were still thriving businesses. Other things had changed. The Microbrew had changed its name and ownership. My Hungarian tailor had retired and a tanning salon had replaced his little shop. My favorite Mexican restaurant had gone. And the Armenian shoe repair shop had expanded business to include luggage repair. A lot is the same and a lot has changed in some eight years. What can be said about downtown Riverdale can also be said about my family.
Tonight, our whole family along with Chloe’s friend Patty will spend the evening enjoying a New Year’s Eve Ball. Guys will be wearing blazers and ladies will be wearing dresses. Amelia and I plan to watch from a distance as Philip dances with one elegantly dressed, lovely teenage girl after another while Chloe and Patty share dances with younger boys. On Sunday, Philip will take part in a lacrosse scrimmage under the lights at Cabrillo High School involving the area’s high school and college players. I plan to plant myself in the bleachers and soak in the pleasure of watching Philip holding his own against MCLA lacrosse players.
So much time has gone by. The adolescent Philip who ballroom dances and plays varsity lacrosse seems so different from the little boy who drank rooph beer and wanted to see another highlighter drawing of Dexter the Dragon before riding home on the twain. But every so often, something as simple as the sight of a second story window brings all those great memories back and connects them to the great memories that are being formed in the present.
The other day I walked past that old office building during my lunch break. There was my former office’s window looking down at me: Second floor, second window from the left. I could see the shade was lowered about one third of the way. My former company had been sold to a larger corporation and operations had been scattered to other locations. Someone I probably did not even know now occupied my former abode. The art work that once occupied the walls inside that office was now hanging from the wall of my home office in Hermes. Still, the second window from the left on the second floor looked virtually unchanged. It was enough to fill me with a flood of memories from that time.
The old company had relocated me and my family from another state to San Geraldo in order for me to work there. That six year job stint took me from the days when Philip couldn’t even pronounce his own name to the first half of his second grade year of elementary school. It included Chloe’s birth and the first three years of her life as well as our move from San Geraldo to Hermes. So much had been packed into a little more than half a decade.
It is funny what memories take hold for us to cherish. For me, one such memory dates back to Philip’s early days in preschool. I had taken the train to work that day. Young Philip loved trains. “Twain – twain,” he would say pointing whenever he spotted one. Amelia had plans to have dinner with a friend in Oxford Hills. We decided she would take Philip to my office for me to bring home. It would be his first chance to actually ride on a train.
Philip and Amelia arrived in the late afternoon. The train home would arrive forty minutes later. I wanted to make Philip’s rare visits to my office special. On that day I began two rituals which I would repeat each time he visited my office for the rest of the time he was in preschool. First, I took him to the office kitchen for a can of root beer from the refrigerator. Going forward, “Rooph Beer” was all he would get to drink in my office and we refrained from serving it to him in any other venue. The other ritual was drawing a picture. With my green highlighter pen and copy paper, I would draw “Dexter the Dragon” which was a children’s ride at the San Geraldo Zoo. Those rituals played out on perhaps twenty visits to my office over the next two years, always at Philip’s request. During some of those visits, Philip would get to ride the twain again.
Walking through downtown Riverdale the other day was an experience somewhere between stepping through a time portal and getting a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past. Some things looked exactly the same. There was still the hair salon run by an extended Vietnamese family that provided a fantastic men’s haircut for a fantastic price. Two coffee shops, two Irish pubs, two Thai restaurants and an upscale deli were still thriving businesses. Other things had changed. The Microbrew had changed its name and ownership. My Hungarian tailor had retired and a tanning salon had replaced his little shop. My favorite Mexican restaurant had gone. And the Armenian shoe repair shop had expanded business to include luggage repair. A lot is the same and a lot has changed in some eight years. What can be said about downtown Riverdale can also be said about my family.
Tonight, our whole family along with Chloe’s friend Patty will spend the evening enjoying a New Year’s Eve Ball. Guys will be wearing blazers and ladies will be wearing dresses. Amelia and I plan to watch from a distance as Philip dances with one elegantly dressed, lovely teenage girl after another while Chloe and Patty share dances with younger boys. On Sunday, Philip will take part in a lacrosse scrimmage under the lights at Cabrillo High School involving the area’s high school and college players. I plan to plant myself in the bleachers and soak in the pleasure of watching Philip holding his own against MCLA lacrosse players.
So much time has gone by. The adolescent Philip who ballroom dances and plays varsity lacrosse seems so different from the little boy who drank rooph beer and wanted to see another highlighter drawing of Dexter the Dragon before riding home on the twain. But every so often, something as simple as the sight of a second story window brings all those great memories back and connects them to the great memories that are being formed in the present.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Unfriending, Blocking, Unblocking and Refriending
The unfriend option is the first line of privacy defense one can use on Facebook. An unfriend can happen without warning. If the unfriender in question was unimportant, the unfriendee might never even notice and probably would not even care. But if the unfriender in question was important, the unfriendee can notice very quickly. Navigate to the unfriender’s profile and the Facebook page contains significantly less information and offers the opportunity to “Add as Friend” by clicking on a blue button.
The block option is a more serious privacy tool. These are the digital equivalent of a restraining order. Blocks can come without warning as well. They do what the word means. A blockee cannot even view a blocker’s pages. The only evidence a blockee can even see of a blockee might be in other people’s tagged photographs. But the blocker’s tag will not provide a link back to the blocker’s profile page for the blockee.
Facebook provides these options to users so they can defend their privacy online and associate only with those with whom they choose to associate. But the existence of such easily deployed defenses adds a new layer of complexity to how people set boundaries with one another. Adolescents are particularly active on Facebook. Unfriending and blocking happen with greater frequency among adolescents than they do among adults. Unblocking and refriending also happen with greater frequency among adolescents.
Every so often Philip experiences an unfriend from a peer and it is to the point where it generally does not even bother Philip any more. He knows that many of his peers are impulsive and that it only requires two clicks of a mouse to unfriend somebody. The act itself usually serves to lower Philip’s opinion of the unfriender in question. Since Philip will not send a friend request to anyone who has unfriended him, the unfriender puts himself or herself in the position of either sending a refriend request or remaining reciprocally unfriended.
Despite Philip’s social resilience to adolescent social politics on Facebook, there was one unfriend that did bother Philip. Nearly one year ago, Erica decided to unfriend Philip. Believing he could easily rectify whatever had led to the unfriend, Philip went to talk to Erica about it during their lunch break at school. In their exchange, she flatly denied unfriending him. But that evening, instead of refriending Philip, Erica blocked him. Her block was followed by Erica bad-mouthing Philip on Facebook, on Formspring and perhaps elsewhere treating the fact that Philip cared about the unfriending as something to joke about with others.
Erica’s unfriend could be written off as impulsive. Lying to Philip when he confronted her in an attempt to reconcile could be attributed to insecurity. The block was an insult that would admittedly be difficult to forgive. But in the end, the talking behind Philip’s back was nothing short of an act of war. For the remainder of their freshman year, things were cold at best between Philip and Erica. But the war Erica initiated took a very distant back seat in both their lives. Philip focused on the varsity lacrosse team, while Erica focused on developing a relationship with an older guy.
By the time their sophomore year was comfortably in session, there didn’t seem to be any outward evidence of a rift between Philip and Erica. Philip was back on Erica’s short list of guys she would press up against for photos. Their smiles in these photos as they were published onto Facebook certainly appeared genuine. But on Facebook, the unfriend and block were still in effect and would remain so until Erica at least made the first move.
That move took place some time before their Thanksgiving break. Perhaps Erica even did it on November 17th, National Unfriending Day. The exact date is unknown. But Philip suddenly noticed Erica’s tags on the photos in which they both appeared suddenly contained links to Erica’s profile page. Philip was glad that Erica had unblocked him, but he certainly was not comfortable initiating a refriend. Erica made her second move after the holiday break had begun by sending Philip a refriend request.
And that is where things stand at the time of this writing. The two have not traded words on the subject in nearly a year. Instead, everything has been unspoken. Now the request to be, Erica’s friend again greets Philip each time he logs onto Facebook. But Philip has still not decided whether or not to refriend with Erica or how long to wait if he does. While Philip is happy to be on friendly terms with Erica at school, the idea of merely accepting the refriend request does not sit well with him. Erica’s insult simply went too far and lasted too long.
And maybe there is just a little bit of satisfaction having the tables turned, because now Philip is the one refusing without explanation to refriend Erica, rather than it being the other way around.
The block option is a more serious privacy tool. These are the digital equivalent of a restraining order. Blocks can come without warning as well. They do what the word means. A blockee cannot even view a blocker’s pages. The only evidence a blockee can even see of a blockee might be in other people’s tagged photographs. But the blocker’s tag will not provide a link back to the blocker’s profile page for the blockee.
Facebook provides these options to users so they can defend their privacy online and associate only with those with whom they choose to associate. But the existence of such easily deployed defenses adds a new layer of complexity to how people set boundaries with one another. Adolescents are particularly active on Facebook. Unfriending and blocking happen with greater frequency among adolescents than they do among adults. Unblocking and refriending also happen with greater frequency among adolescents.
Every so often Philip experiences an unfriend from a peer and it is to the point where it generally does not even bother Philip any more. He knows that many of his peers are impulsive and that it only requires two clicks of a mouse to unfriend somebody. The act itself usually serves to lower Philip’s opinion of the unfriender in question. Since Philip will not send a friend request to anyone who has unfriended him, the unfriender puts himself or herself in the position of either sending a refriend request or remaining reciprocally unfriended.
Despite Philip’s social resilience to adolescent social politics on Facebook, there was one unfriend that did bother Philip. Nearly one year ago, Erica decided to unfriend Philip. Believing he could easily rectify whatever had led to the unfriend, Philip went to talk to Erica about it during their lunch break at school. In their exchange, she flatly denied unfriending him. But that evening, instead of refriending Philip, Erica blocked him. Her block was followed by Erica bad-mouthing Philip on Facebook, on Formspring and perhaps elsewhere treating the fact that Philip cared about the unfriending as something to joke about with others.
Erica’s unfriend could be written off as impulsive. Lying to Philip when he confronted her in an attempt to reconcile could be attributed to insecurity. The block was an insult that would admittedly be difficult to forgive. But in the end, the talking behind Philip’s back was nothing short of an act of war. For the remainder of their freshman year, things were cold at best between Philip and Erica. But the war Erica initiated took a very distant back seat in both their lives. Philip focused on the varsity lacrosse team, while Erica focused on developing a relationship with an older guy.
By the time their sophomore year was comfortably in session, there didn’t seem to be any outward evidence of a rift between Philip and Erica. Philip was back on Erica’s short list of guys she would press up against for photos. Their smiles in these photos as they were published onto Facebook certainly appeared genuine. But on Facebook, the unfriend and block were still in effect and would remain so until Erica at least made the first move.
That move took place some time before their Thanksgiving break. Perhaps Erica even did it on November 17th, National Unfriending Day. The exact date is unknown. But Philip suddenly noticed Erica’s tags on the photos in which they both appeared suddenly contained links to Erica’s profile page. Philip was glad that Erica had unblocked him, but he certainly was not comfortable initiating a refriend. Erica made her second move after the holiday break had begun by sending Philip a refriend request.
And that is where things stand at the time of this writing. The two have not traded words on the subject in nearly a year. Instead, everything has been unspoken. Now the request to be, Erica’s friend again greets Philip each time he logs onto Facebook. But Philip has still not decided whether or not to refriend with Erica or how long to wait if he does. While Philip is happy to be on friendly terms with Erica at school, the idea of merely accepting the refriend request does not sit well with him. Erica’s insult simply went too far and lasted too long.
And maybe there is just a little bit of satisfaction having the tables turned, because now Philip is the one refusing without explanation to refriend Erica, rather than it being the other way around.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
When Life’s Consequences Overtake Parental Punishment
I like to watch television shows on DVD with each of my kids. So does Amelia. Right now I am watching Season 1 of Glee with Chloe. The show has just about every high school subplot, stereotype and neo-stereotype the authors could squeeze into a single television season of forty-three minute episodes of what Philip calls High School Musical: The Series. Chloe loves it. I enjoy it. And most importantly it launches us into important daddy-daughter conversations.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)