Dec 12 2008
Failure to protect
There’s a lot on my mind this morning and what weighs heaviest on my thoughts today is a parent that fails to protect their young. I sometimes feel that trying to tell these people anything is like hitting my head against a brick wall. So I will say it once more just for the record. Children who are from the ages six to twelve are not old enough to have a my space page. There is no excuse for this. Do these people not watch the nightly news? Do they just not care what their children are doing online? What is it? Someone please explain this to me.
My second husband has a daughter that has a ten year old child who’s my-space page I happen to run across not too long ago. She had on her page that she was eighteen years old and so I looked at her pictures and I was just sick. She had pictures taken with poses trying to make herself look sexy and she had pictures taken blowing kisses and trying to hold up some sort of sign with her hands that was a peace sign upside down and sideways with the other hand with a ball cap on that was turned sideways. I reported her to the site several times over the span of several weeks and told them that she was just ten years old but they never did anything about it. The child’s mother would not do anything about it. She did not have time. So after over a month of my worrying about this child I told her Aunt and she deleted the page from the internet.
I wondered at first if that was just the difference in raising your children in a large city like Columbus than we here in Oklahoma. I live in a small town and you see kids walking down the road with fishing poles and riding bikes and if you see someone’s child acting up in public you go to the parent and they take care of it they don’t accuse you of being nosy. Then I realized this is not a city vs. country thing. This is just lazy parenting. My second husband has a middle daughter who has three kids and they are the most well behaved children I have ever seen, so this is just a parent not minding what her kids do.
Young children should be outside playing. My grandsons came down to see me not to long ago and they played outside with dirt. Yes dirt! They had my dad push a large pile of dirt into a wall type shape and they had sticks and the dirt pile was their fort. I watched their adventures from the living room window and it made me smile to see what all these young children cooked up in their imaginations. This is what young children should be doing. Not online posing for pictures and posting them online for predators to see. Protect your children people! Take an interest. We all wonder why teenage pregnancy is on the rise. Are we failing to protect our young due to lazy parenting or are they just uncontrollable.
