In this time of uncertainty, use this holiday season as the perfect excuse to slow down and enjoy yourself with friends and family. Play the Wii with your kids, text your teen on their new cell phone, grab that Guitar Hero controller. Be a kid with your kids for a little while. It’s quite fun!
See you all soon!
Nearly all cell phones these days include all kinds of extras like Bluetooth, QWERTY keyboards, expandable memory, speakerphones, MP3 players, text messaging capabilities, and cameras (ohh those those dreaded cameras). The camera feature on cell phones provide quite a convenience, as you can snap quick shots when an actual camera isn’t available. On the other hand, for today’s teens, that innocent little camera on their phone can get them into a whole heap of trouble. Just ask the two Washington teens who were suspended from the cheerleading squad when nude photos of them circulated throughout school. Sending sexually charged text messages or nude photos via cell phone has been coined “sexting”, and it’s yet another example of why today’s parents should all be more aware of the technology our kids our using.
As winter settles in here in the great white North, we find ourselves doing more and more things inside. For my family, this means things like watching football, catching up on movies, surfing the web, baking cookies (Superdad here baked cookies with my 6 year old girl last weekend), and playing video games (gasp!). I really enjoy the outdoors and the warmer months, but the colder weather and being inside more offers some advantages - namely, we find ourselves doing more things together as a family, including playing video games together. I’ve played more Madden / Rock Band / Guitar Hero / Halo 3 (with my kids) on our Xbox 360 over the past month… I almost forgot how much fun it can be. So why should you pick up that controller too?
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus from WiredParentPad - not at all by choice, just life getting in the way. A major website implementation at work, getting ready for deer hunting season (no we don’t shoot Bambi, but we try for his big-horned dad each year at this time), preparing for the holiday season, a Total Money Makeover (thank you, Dave Ramsey), and so much more. My wife and I even managed to squeeze in two, yeah two, live shows of a friend’s band from Bozeman, Montana - The Clintons. I could do an entire article centered around just The Clintons and how much I’ve fallen in love with their music and their message and their whole vibe, but I digress…
On the Wired front, WiredParentPad was honored to be named among the 50 Best Dad Blogs on Vanessa Van Petten’s blog Teens Today. Thank you Vanessa! Coming from someone who is a part of Generation Y and is completely immersed in today’s teen culture, I am humbled to be mentioned among your 50 Best!
Things are starting to settle down, I’ll be off work next week, and writing more helpful information for all of you hungry parents of teens is pulling at me bad (I’ve got so many ideas stored up and my life with two teenage boys is full of living, breathing examples for things to write on). Starting next week, I expect to be back at full strength - until then, stay wired. Oh, and don’t forget to keep practicing that texting.
Photo courtesy of dsevilla.
Jolt, Buzzed, Amp, Red Bull, Monster, Rockstar, Nos, Full Throttle, Sobe… sounds like nicknames for the starting lineup of a hockey team, but they’re not. These, my fellow wired parents, are the names of just a handful of the many different energy drinks that our teens are consuming by the “BFC” (that’s an acronym for Big F*****g Can, and is indeed the name used for one style of Monster drinks). And we thought we were wild when we were kids and we drank Mountain Dew, now they have things like Hype and Bawls to get their kicks with. Are these energy drinks safe? As parents of today’s teens, should we be concerned?
“That’s so gay.” If you’re a parent of one of today’s teens, these three words have more than likely been uttered by that once sweet son or daughter of yours. It’s an epidemic of sorts, so wide spread that schools, and even celebrities, are taking a stand to try and get teens to ThinkB4YouSpeak. Our son’s high school has posters littered throughout hallways and classrooms suggesting alternatives to “That’s so gay”, such as “That’s so lame”, or “That’s so ludicrous”. Yeah, “That’s so ludicrous”.
As parents in the digital age, it’s never been easier to stay up-to-date and informed on how our kids are doing in school. Web-based school administration programs and school websites provide us with class schedules, updated assignments, after-school activity schedules, and teachers’ email addresses and phone numbers. Parents and students can utilize these online tools to keep track of daily assignments and track progress throughout the school year. Our school district recently switched to a system called Skyward Family Access, and after using it for the past week or so, I simply love it.
When was the last time one of your kids (or you, for that matter), bought a music CD? A month ago, six months ago, a couple years ago? Over the past couple of years, more and more of us are turning to digital music and away from CDs - a trend led by our youth. While the digital trend in music is definitely a convenient one, it can be tricky one for today’s parents to keep up with to make sure our kids aren’t doing anything illegal (does Limewire mean anything to you?).
It was a foggy, late September morning here in northern Wisconsin. The sun had just come up, the grass was wet with dew, and the kids were scrambling to gather their backpacks and head out the door to catch the bus. As my two teenage boys strolled across the dewey grass, I peered out the front door to catch a glimpse of both of them side by side, heads down, texting. It was one of those classic moments where you wish you had a camera right there in your hand - they were walking off into the fog toward the bus stop checking their phones and texting at 7:00am. It made me think - how much teen texting is too much? At what point does it become a problem, or perhaps, even an addiction?
If you’ve ever bought your kids a video game or play video games yourself, you’ve probably noticed that little black box with a big black “E” or “T” or “M” (among others) in it. That letter represents the ESRB rating for the game - the Entertainment Software Rating Board rating. That seemingly meaningless little letter on the front of the box represents the “age appropriateness” of the game. On the back, you’ll find the same ESRB Rating letter along with “content descriptors” which indicate why a game may have gotten a particular rating. Do you pay much, if any, attention to these ESRB ratings? Do you think it should be illegal for a retailer to sell a video game that doesn’t contain an ESRB rating? Maybe it’s time for all of us parents to start paying more attention to these labels - here’s why…
