Stop Cyberbullying Day

I really feel passionately about this, not so much from a blogging perspective, but from the seriously electronically addicted society we live in. I have personally been electronically monitored by people, more than was really necessary. But, what pains me more are the young girls that I volunteer with. Their boyfriends hound them day and night. Whether it's text messaging, plain and simple phone calls, MySpace comments...it can get out of hand so easily. And the pain that can be caused by the demonstrated unheathy expectations of one person to another via electronic means of communication is very upsetting to me.

I'm not much of an activist. I actually had to think about what that word was that I was trying to use there. That's how much I'm not one. But, this issue is something that I think can fly under the radar of the parents who had kids when they were actually old enough to have kids. It blows my mind to think of parenting without my own MySpace account. I love that my daughter's friends will accept me as their friend. I think just them knowing that I care enough to spend a little time commenting their sites and keeping track of what's going on in their worlds will matter in the end.

I feel that if we (the honestly real and maybe somewhat un-sane grown ups) in our kids lives would go to the effort of helping to show our youth what's okay and what's not okay to say online or off and how to resolve conflicts and how to be transparent but not someone completely different than you are in your real life, then maybe the electronically driven tribe will not destroy itself. Maybe, just maybe there are people who are grown up enough to lead this silly little internet somewhere besides to porn and abuse.

I don't know, maybe that's just lofty thinking.

Hey ~ check out this cute icon!