Mind the Gap!

So our Pastor at church has been preaching about responsibility a lot lately, and it has got me thinking about my responsibilities and taking them more seriously. Youth group especially. I am putting together a newsletter for the parents in our church about youth culture and how to find a mutual platform for conversation. From what I've seen, youth today are looking for authenticity and meaning. They want to belong, to make a difference, to be someone. They want relationships, they want to be heard and seen.

Take these desires and add to the mix the new online applications like MySpace, Facebook, and heck, even Blogger, you have a great tool as well as a great danger. These social networking sites are a great way to connect to your friends, make new friends, post pictures, and make your voice heard. It is a place to carve out a little space just for you on the internet. Teens are on MySpace like never before, and often unsupervised simply because their parents are unaware of the possible dangers. What kinds of dangers? It's just a nice place to talk to their friends, right? Think about this: What if the teen posts their phone number, posts a picture that has their home address in the background, their birthdate, full name. Any of this information is ripe for the picking by unscrupulous hands. I'm not saying that these sites are bad, but just like anything, they can be misused and should be monitored by parents.

So parents, what can you do? Google your kids. I'm serious. Put their name (first and last) in quotation marks and search for them on Google. It is amazing what can come up. For instance, I Google myself now and then, just to see what comes up. It's surprising. Typical things, like my website and my blog. In 2001 I signed an online endometriosis "quilt", that still shows up. I found that someone I don't know quoted my blog in their blog (certainly an odd feeling, and they took it totally out of context), and a message board from my 2004 astronomy class where I posted a couple times talking about theories of the age of the universe. Crazy stuff that I didn't even remember writing, let alone that it was still findable online.

So yes, parents; Google your kids, look at their MySpace page frequently, look at their friends MySpace pages, but above all, teach them safe online practices. Tell them to not give out revealing info, only post things that they would want their parents and (more often these days) their potential employer to see. More and more employers are Googling their applicants. You can tell a lot about a person by the online social networks they belong to. If your child belongs to the group "Another day in the drunk tank", then, yeah, you might want to have a conversation about alcohol.

Above all, parents need to educate themselves about the things their children spend the most time on. Is your child always on MySpace? Check it out. Facebook? Get comfortable with it. Flickr? Figure it out. Otherwise, your children will be on this wide, vast internet, talking to who knows what kind of people, posting tons of pictures, and putting themselves (and you) in all kinds of danger. Get with it, parents; it's only going to get worse if you don't start now.

Happy First Birthday, Judah!!

Well, Judah is finally a year old today. It's truly amazing how fast it went by. I don't even remember him being such a little tiny thing. It seems like I've always known him.

For his first birthday, Judah passed two milestones. The first, and more major one, is that he finally was able to walk across the room. Haltingly and hesitantly, yes, but walking nonetheless.

The second milestone is that I had to clear off his bookshelf of all but board books or vinyl books. It's like the verse in the Bible, Ezekiel 3:3 "Then he said to me, 'Son of man, eat this scroll I am giving you and fill your stomach with it.' So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth." I don't know what paper tastes like, but if the poor state of those books are any answer, they must be sweet. Judah ate the spines, ate corners off the covers, tore out pages. Finally, I gave up for a while and stored all his paper books until he gets out of this habit.

Next Generation

No, this isn't a Star Trek post, sorry. I suppose it's inevitable that when you have a kid you think about what they'll grow up into, and what kind of generation they'll be a part of. At least, I think about it a lot, but it especially came into clarity when I read Polaroids from the Dead by Douglas Coupland. Now, it certainly isn't his best, but it is a nice, somewhat sad look at culture in general. It summed up the generations quite nicely, and it got me thinking about what my generation is like, and what Judah's will be like in the future.

My generation is post-industrial, post-modern, post-nuclear, and some even say post-human. What, then, is left to name a generation when all of the monikers have been used? Today we are a transient generation: The ill-formed offspring of ex-hippie parents, still pining for freedom but tethered to the tide of digitalization. Born in a place, no more than a name, and always moving on. Not the upwardly mobile days of old, but a non-linear, meaningless sporadic movement of the virtually disconnected. We are, as Coupland says, de-narrated.

What is left for a homogenized time, when neuroses are normal and we look with suspicion upon anyone who claims to be anything remotely normal. If someone has lived in the same town all their life, never been divorced, abused, or unhappy, we wonder and mutter at them as we pass by; what are you hiding? where are your skeletons? You don't belong.

What then is left for the next generation? A generation that is more digital than human? Will we have a cadre of children who cannot relate in person, because they are used to vitual space? Children who can code computer programs but not read a book? It certainly seems like a terminal prognosis, though I'm sure our parents thought the same thing and look how well our generation turned out. In a manner of speaking, of course.