Here’s a thought from Jean-Yves Frappier, the head of the adolescent division at Sainte-Justine Hospital in Montreal and president of the Canadian Association for Adolescent Health, as quoted in Today’s Parent magazine a number of years ago: just when you thought that it was ok/necessary/unavoidable to be considered redundant by your teenagers, he has this to say:

I always compare parents to the while line one the highway.  You don’t always look at the line when it’s sunny, but if it’s dark and rainy, you look at that line to make sure you are on the right path.  That line is always there, always, always.

Fantastic!  What a great way to remind us that while the teen years may be challenging, giving up or assuming our kids don’t want us around is never the answer.  So what can you do instead?  I encourage parents to keep offering to do things with your teens, whether that’s go our for dinner or shopping or to a concert or special event or playing a game…or whatever.  Will they take you up on it?  Perhaps not.  But keep putting yourself out there, and letting your kids know you’re there for them.

Include all of your kids in decisions like family vacations, how to spend free time like school holidays, and the running of the house.  Cheer them on at their sporting events or recitals.  Keep t.v.’s and computers in central areas of your house (never let your child have a web cam in their rooms), and watch and discuss shows together.  Let them know that you love them and love having them in your family.

I came across this great web site of Rob Nickel’s, who is a former OPP detective and is currently a world-renowned expert on cyber safety.  This link takes you straight to his Tips for Parents page, which has a lot of important information about keeping our kids safe online.  Here are some highlights:

• always have your computer in a public place in the house, not your child’s bedroom
• teach them never to meet an online friend offline unless you are with them
• make sure your kids are comfortable coming to you and that you don’t overreact when there’s a problem
• encourage discussions between you and your kids about what they enjoy online
• warn them that people aren’t always who they say they are online, and that people they chat with are not their friends, just people they chat with
• discuss and agree to Internet rules
• teach them never to give out personal information

This is just a snapshot of some of what Rob shares; it’s worth taking a closer look at.  And while you’re there, you have the opportunity to sign a petition to have the sex offender registry made public, which would all us to know if a sex offender lives in our neighbourhood.  Currently only police have access to this information — but wouldn’t you want to know if your child shares his or her neighbourhood with someone who has a history of sexual offences, especially since child molesters, of all sexual offenders, are the most likely to re-offend?  If this is information you’d want to have access to, this petition is a great place to start.

You may or may not have already had "the talk" with your kids, your daughters in particular.  You may be avoiding it like the plague, you may feel that there’s no need because if your daughter needs information she’ll come to you, or you may be confident that you’ve got the kind of relationship with your daughter that’s open and healthy, and not much slips by you. 

Here’s the problem: regardless of how you would describe your experience or expectations in this area, there’s a good chance a lot is going on that you don’t know about.

Here are some facts to consider, from a recent survey:

• "Only 22 percent of mothers think their daughters are uncomfortable talking to them about sex, while 61 percent of girls say that, in fact, they are."
• "…the actual number of 15- to 18-year-olds in our survey having oral sex (30 percent) is double the number mothers know about, or even suspect…"
• "…46 percent of girls that age who’ve had intercourse didn’t tell their moms."
• "Seventy-eight percent of surveyed girls who are no longer virgins say they’ve had sex without using a condom, and 65 percent of them admit they lied about or hid it from their mothers."
• "…a sobering 56 percent of girls who are no longer virgins have had sex without any form of birth control: Sixty-six percent of these girls have kept that a secret from Mom."
• "Even among the few girls who had an abortion, many didn’t tell."
• "…only 4 percent of girls say their moms are the biggest influence on their attitudes toward sex."

Did anything there surprise you?

These statistics are direct quotes from an article by Liz Brody in O Magazine.  Here’s a link to the full article (I definitely recommend reading the whole thing).  The survey referred to is one that was conducted jointly with O Magazine and Seventeen Magazine, in which 1000 girls ages 15-22,  and 1000 moms of girls those ages, were surveyed. 

The words I would use to describe my reaction to this survey are distressed, saddened, and re-energized.  It’s time to take control of this topic within our own families, get educated ourselves, and open up a dialogue so that we can say with 100% confidence, that the results of this survey don’t reflect what’s happening with our kids.  Here are some resources from Oprah to get you started:

First of all, read the whole article.  Make sure you have accurate information in order to answer any questions she may have, learn from what’s worked (and not) from the moms interviewed, and decide what approach you’ll take with your daughter.

There’s also an online quiz you can take to determine how well you’ve been doing in this area with your own daughter.  It’s another great resource.

If you know that your daughter is thinking about having sex with her boyfriend, Dr Laura Berman, a sex therapist who has been a part of this discussion on Oprah’s show, has a list of questions to ask your daughter and her boyfriend before they go ahead with their plan.  You can find the questions here.

Dr Berman has also prepared a handbook for parents to talk to their kids about sex, regardless of their age.  It’s great — get it here.  And on that same page is a set of visual aids that you can use in your own talk, as well as a video of Dr Berman coaching a mom through the talk with her daughter. 

Take a deep breath.  You can do it!

Nobody wants their child’s name to be famous because the child is missing.  I doubt there’s a parent in southwestern Ontario whose heart isn’t breaking right now.  But instead of panic and knee-jerk reactions, this is the time to remind ourselves of what we can do to protect our kids and teach them street smarts.  There are many different programs that teach street-proofing; the one I really like is called Yello Dyno, because of it’s positive, non-scary focus.  It helps kids to feel empowered and smart, and I think that makes a big difference in their ability to actually use the information. 

One of the products Yello Dyno sells is a CD with songs about important safety messages.  The reason this is so important is that research has shown that when in a panic situation, our brains can’t readily access information that’s stored in the way that we might typically store street-proofing and safety messages that are simply drilled into us.  Our fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in, and the "memory" part of our brain shuts down.  The music part of our brain, however, is still working.  (What amazing computers our brains are!)  This is why we have songs stuck in our heads for days at a time, why we remember jingles so easily, and why, 16 years later, I can still remember the chant for the phone number for the foot patrol at my university (6-61-36-50, call 6-61-36-50…).  So getting back to Yello Dyno…the CD has eight songs on it that all focus on specific messages for kids to remember, even when they’re in a panic situation.  Brilliant.

The first song focuses on the Yello Dyno Yell, which involves getting comfortable with making noise, and yelling things like "Help!  This is not my Dad!"  Tricky People is the term they use to describe possible predators, and the second song talks about how to identify and recognize a tricky person (visualized by a wolf in sheep’s clothing).  Help Me Operator teaches kids how to dial 0 and what to say to the operator, Trust Your Feelings is about recognizing and valuing intuition as a means to evaluating the safety of a situation, and My Body’s Mine teaches kids how to value their own bodies and not feel uncomfortable standing up for themselves when someone else invades their space.  Get Outta My Face continues the empowerment theme with helping kids to feel fine telling an adult to get lost.  If Your Parents Get Lost advises kids on how to handle being separated from their parents when out in public, and Safely Held in Your Heart is a lullaby from a parent to a child (and vice versa) about how important the child is to the parent and to what lengths the parent will go to keep the child safe. 

That’s just a run-down of the music on the CD.  I can’t say enough about how great I think all of their materials are.  Now the bad news: they only deliver to addresses in the US.  Darn!  If you happen to have friends or family there who could ship to you from their place, or if you’re going on vacation, have it sent a day or two before you leave to your hotel…a pain, I agree, but I think you’ll find that the material is well worth the effort.

(saying a silent prayer that Tori is found safe and healthy)

There was a very interesting article by Zosia Bielski in the Globe and Mail on Monday about all of the new high-tech gadgets parents can get to keep an eye on their kids.  Here are some of the options the author discusses:

If you’re still snooping on your teen through Facebook, you’re hopelessly out of touch. Tech-savvy parents are taking advantage of a slew of new surveillance gadgets to control almost anything their teens try to do, from driving while texting, to going haywire with the debit card at the mall, to more troubling deeds like "sexting."

Today, Discover is launching the Current Card, which lets parents control their teens’ spending by limiting how and where the card can be used. Online, parents can keep track of every transaction as it happens.

Zoombak’s Universal A-GPS locator, which will be available in Canada later this year, lets users set up "custom safety zones" around any location including homes, parks, malls and schools. When the device crosses one of the virtual boundaries, a text message alerts the parents.

Surveillance has also extended into the car. In October, Ford launched MyKey, which lets parents control how fast their child can drive and how loud the music blares. It can also be programmed to chime until the driver puts on a seatbelt. Last month, Dallas-based WQN introduced software that can disable a cellphone while its owner is driving.

This fall, Canadian software company Aegis Mobility will launch its DriveAssist system, which will not only disable the cellphone, but will also send a message to callers or texters saying the person they are trying to reach is busy driving.

Perhaps this makes us pine for the days of our childhood when we needed a quarter to make a call and there was no such thing as texting.  Or perhaps we see it as a necessary evil in order to make sure that we’re keeping one step ahead of the predators who would do our kids harm, whether they’re in chat rooms or in the seat next to our child in the classroom.  The article sparked a number of (occasionally heated) comments from readers on the Globe site, arguing for both sides of the privacy issue.  Some parents feel "my house, my right" and others felt that invading your child’s privacy this way just results in kids feeling as though their parents assume they are untrustworthy and encourages them to be sneaky .

One problem with this kind of surveillance is that while it creates a sense of security for the parents, it keeps kids from being in a position to make their own decisions, which can catch up with them later in life.  I’m not advocating a complete "do what you want, it’s your life" attitude toward our children, just that we have to balance their safety needs with their needs to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills.   

I see a lot of this coming back to the sense of entitlement we have inadvertently created with our kids.  We pay for the cell phone, then we pay for monitoring software because we want to know what’s going on.  The article mentions a debit card with a pre-set limit because we want to teach them "financial responsibility" — but ultimately, they have access to money we’ve earned, not their own money.  When we give our kids too much, we really do teach them to expect that they can have their cake and eat it too, to constantly push against and test the strength of the boundaries we have created, instead of teaching them to self-monitor and develop a sense of responsibility of their own. 

If giving your child a coat with a GPS sewn into it makes you feel better, or if having copies of the texts your teen receives on his or her cell phone helps you to sleep better at night, then definitely go for it.  Just make sure that you’ve found the best way to help yourself sleep while also sending important messages about trust and responsibility.  Privacy is a big issue for kids, and once you’ve crossed that line into being considered a "snoop", it can be difficult to be maintain a position of also being someone your kids can talk to about anything.  Look for the balance between monitoring everything they do and letting them do whatever they want, and you’ll both feel better.

Someone asked me recently what to do when you don’t like your teenage son or daughter’s boyfriend/girlfriend.  It’s definitely a tricky subject.  While as parents we don’t want to watch our kids blindly stumble through life, making wrong choice after wrong choice, when we, with our gifts of objectivity, perspective, and experience, can help them out, the reality is, there’s not much we can do in situations like this.  Ultimately, the decision of whom to date is the sole responsibility of our kids (unless you belong to a culture where the parents take full responsibility for their children’s dating…but if that were the case, we wouldn’t be having this conversation anyway).  Here are some thoughts on how to proceed…

Start off by having a gentle conversation with your teen about what you see happening.  If you have run-of-the-mill concerns because you think the (let’s assume you have a daughter with a boyfriend) boyfriend is too needy, too selfish, too impolite, too whatever, coming right out and saying that you think he’s a jerk is automatically going to turn your daughter off.  Here’s the catch: it will still turn her off even if she secretly agrees with you.  She has an investment in not having you know and be right about everything at this point in her life, so she’s not going to readily admit that you’ve got a point if you come at her with both guns blazing.  It’s a matter of principle.

Instead, let her know in a respectful and gentle way that you have some concerns, and that you want to make sure that she’s ok.  Approaching her from a position of concern and love is going to be better received than from a position of animosity, frustration, or defensiveness.  Your messages of love and concern may still be met with hostility from your teen.  That’s ok; you tried.  Let it go at this point.  You can make gentle statements of acknowledgement of what’s happening, without sliding into sarcasm or lectures, from now on, just to let her know that you still have her on your radar and that you haven’t washed your hands of her relationship.  In a sense, you’re agreeing to disagree.  This will be important to her if she decides in the future that she wants to extricate herself from the relationship, because now she knows that you’ll still be there for her to talk to, without judgment or "I told you so". 

Some examples of this kind of acknowledgement might be

• You are a really great friend to (give up your free afternoon/tutor him/help him clean out the garage).
• He’s lucky to have you to support him during (the loss of his grandmother/tough exam time/his parents’ divorce).
• I’m here if you need me, and I know you’re a smart cookie who can decide what’s best for her
• I love you no matter what.

What if you think your daughter may be the recipient of abuse at the hands of her boyfriend?  Ahh, that’s a different kettle of fish.  This situation causes parents to hit the panic button — and rightly so.  It’s important to tread carefully here, though, because you don’t want to inadvertently push her away from you and closer to him.  Abusers are fantastic at twisting facts and perceptions around so that our girl doesn’t know which way is up, and worries that she’s too far in to be able to ask for help to get out.  Embarrassment, fear, shame, and not wanting to disappoint can also be playing a factor. 

It’s important for you to speak to someone with experience in this area (i.e. a counsellor or psychologist, family doctor, or expert in helping girls in abusive relationships), as it’s a complicated and dangerous situation — there’s more to know than what I can cover here.  Here are some thoughts on where to start.  If you think that your daughter is being mistreated, tell her so.  Be loving and willing to listen to her; sometimes it takes girls a while to wrap their minds around the fact that this guy who treats her so well at times is actually an abusive boyfriend.  If you try to strong-arm her into listening to you and trusting you when she wants to believe something else, you’re now doing exactly the same thing to her that he is.  Be loving, be supportive, check in with her every once in a while as to how she’s doing and if there’s anything she would like you to do for her.  Read up on abusive teen relationships and know what additional supports are out there for her.  Show her through your actions that you are not the controlling, demanding, emotionally-blackmailing type of person that her boyfriend is by offering her unconditional love and support, and get outside help for both of you when the time is right.

Here’s a resource for teens in abusive relationships: TEAR: Teens Experiencing Abusive Relationships

And here’s one for you as a parent: Dr Jill Murray, an expert in abusive relationships

I just saw a rather funny magazine article about all sorts of electronic gadgets designed to keep kids safe.  I’ve often joked with my husband that I’d like to get some sort of chip implanted in our kids so that they can be tracked down by GPS should they ever go missing…but some of these honest-to-goodness gadgets will actually do something similar.  It leads me to wonder about how we as parents feel about our role in the safety of our children, and the difference between actual safety and the illusion of safety.  For example, I remember years ago seeing an Oprah show about a girl who was attacked and almost raped as she walked alone across her university campus at night.  She said right on the show that she felt that because she’d had her cell phone with her, she figured she’d always be fine, but of course, the first thing the attacker did was knock the cell phone out of her hands and into the woods.  As one safety expert described them, cell phones are communication tools, not protective devices.  Which leaves this particular girl in a very scary predicament.

From home ID kits — including that critical piece of your child’s DNA — to personal safety alarms to GPS wristwatches, there’s plenty of options for the safety-conscious parent out there.  The question for me is, do these actually keep kids safe, or do they lull parents and kids alike into false sense of security?  Because if they encourage kids to feel invincible, they are much more likely to put themselves into dangerous positions because they don’t have a full grasp of the potential consequences. 

Here’s another example of safety measures perhaps leading us down the garden path: police checks.  They are outdated the minute they are printed, and all they report on is whether or not you have been caught and/or convicted of a crime, not that you haven’t actually committed any.  But the police consider them to be valid for three years from the date of issue.  (I guess that gives you a three year window in which to do you bad deeds before they catch up with you.)  But if that’s what the issuer feels is appropriate — and let’s hope that they’ve done some studies to suggest that a three-year expiry actually has some validity — then that should be accepted.  When I took my police check and my husband’s to my daughter’s school so that we could volunteer, we were told that mine didn’t count because it was more than six months old and my husband’s wasn’t acceptable because, although it was only two months old, it was completed by a private agency, not the police department.  When I argued with the principal that they were both considered valid by the issuer, namely the police department, she shrugged and told me that it was a board policy, not the school’s, and that requiring current police checks is a measure to "keep the students safe".  I politely pointed out that police checks do not, in fact, keep anyone safe.  (For current evidence of that, check out the article in yesterday’s National Post about the young girl who suffered a brain injury while in foster care, probably due to shaken baby syndrome; when the Children’s Aid spokesperson was interviewed for the article, she helpfully pointed out that all foster parents have a police check done.  I’m sure that’s very comforting to this girl, to know that she is the one who broke the perfect police record of her foster parents.)  And the problem with sticking like glue to these types of measures is that if you create too many hoops, the only people who can be bothered to jump through them are the exact people you do not want near your kids.

Here’s the bottom line: police checks to do not keep our kids safe.  Education and vigilance do.  A GPS watch is a nice add-on, but as soon as it gets ripped off and thrown in the bushes, I have my fingers crossed that our kids would know what to do next.

(If you’d like solid, research-based, non-scary safety information for your kids, I can’t recommend Yello Dyno enough.  Here’s the downside: at last check, they only shipped to the States.  Boo.  But if you’re headed there on vacation, perhaps you could have it shipped to your hotel, or if you have family and friends who could receive it at their house and then forward it to on to you, I promise you, you’ll be able to sleep better at night knowing you’ve shared this age-appropriate information with your kids.  It’s designed for kids ages four to 12.)

What is too young to wear a thong?  When I was a teenager, it wasn’t even an option, but girls today — some as young as 10 or 11 — are wearing them.  Or want to wear them.  What’s a responsible parent to do?

On the one hand, you can clamp down and say, "Absolutely no way."  Of course, the response you’ll probably get is a lot of sulking (if you’re lucky) or screaming and yelling (if you’re not).  You’ll probably also have a kid who takes her babysitting money and sneaks out to La Senza when you’re not around and buys herself one anyway.

On the other hand, you could use this as an opportunity to discuss why she wants to wear a thong, what it means to her, and what message it sends to others when they see it.  Kids need to know why we feel the way we do, not just that we disagree with them.  Have a conversation with the parents of some of her friends.  Are all of her friends really wearing them?  Or do their parents have some concerns, too?

You might not like the idea of the thong, but perhaps you could make it clear that if she wears one, it is not to be viewable by the general public, and that’s the compromise.  As long as her undergarments remain under, you may be able to strike a balance you can both live with.

Teenagers have all sorts of great ideas.  These may involve camping unsupervised with a group of friends, going to an unsupervised party at a friend’s house while the parents are away (or, worse, throwing an unsupervised party at your house while you are away), or or taking a summer job tree planting in northern Ontario.  While these ideas may be great as far as your child is concerned, you may have some serious reservations yourself.

So what do you do?

Read the rest of this entry »

We live in a worried society.  We worry about everything — real and imagined — and we go our of our way to protect ourselves against these dangers.  But in overhearing a parent at the mall say to her daughter, "And keep your cell phone on in case something happens," I wondered: do cell phones make our kids safer?

Ages ago I watched an Oprah show about a college student who was assaulted on her way through a campus forest after a party.  She said that she thought she was safe because she had her cell with her, but the moment she got off the phone, her attacker jumped her and tossed the cell in the woods.  With her safety net gone, she had to fend him off unprepared.  (Which, thankfully, she did, but who wants that experience for their daughter??)

I think the important question we as parents need to ask ourselves is: would I let my child do (fill in the blank) if he did NOT have a cell phone?  That should be the criteria we use to determine what we’re comfortable with and what we’re not.  Because at the end of the day, I’m just not convinced that cell phones are the adolescent safety tools we wish they were.