Parenting Daily

If your child has a cell phone, chances are good that they’re texting. Texting is a very popular type of instant message communication with cell phone users. All ages of users are texting but the medium is especially popular with teens and 20-somethings. As the prices of texting drop and unlimited packages become available for smaller fees, I fully expect texting to increase further in popularity.

But does your teen have a camera phone? If so, they may be indulging in the latest scary cell-phone trend: sexting. Yesterday, I stumbled upon this article about the trend, which I hadn’t yet thought of or imagined. I guess I could have predicted kids would be doing a version of cyber sex through texting, but sexting involves taking nude pictures and sending them, via cell phones, to your significant other. And then, guess what? Since teen romances tend to last so long (sarcasm) the pics end up getting posted on the internet. How’s that for horrifying?

Some of the pics that end up on the internet are leading to criminal charges for the posters. Which is good—I hope that gets a lot of attention and discourages other teens from doing similar things. And it isn’t just teens, middle school students (who are sometimes as young as 11) are involved, too. Unfortunately, as has been the case with videos of kids getting beat up, there have been a lot of copy-cats. So it may be the case that we’ll see a flare-up of these incidents with nude pics of kids showing up online for awhile and then, hopefully, kids will get the message that this isn’t going to be tolerated and it will die down. I keep hoping that we’re done with the copy-cat cases of the videos of beatings but that hasn’t quite happened yet, either.

This is another one of those topics that you need to talk to your teen about. Even if they, themselves, don’t have cell phones with text or picture capabilities, they probably have friends who do. It’s entirely possible their bad judgment can extend to letting friends take nude pics, so it’s still worth talking about. Let your kids know that they can face criminal charges if they post someone else’s pics online (nude or not, better safe than sorry!) and if they send inappropriate pics of themselves to others. I mean, can you just imagine if your boss decided to send a nude pic to you? That’s (hopefully) not wanted! That would be considered sexual harassment. I don’t care if the teens think their significant others want these pictures—they could very easily be discovered by a parent and the teen, in the interest of trying to get out of trouble, could say the pics were unwanted.

I could go on and on about how many bad directions sexting can go but I’ve probably given you enough fodder for today! We certainly all did stupid things as kids… it’s just not the same world now. Now stupid kid things can find a home online forever. It’s nothing to shrug off.

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