Parental Control

We take an interlude from sports to address some real issues. Okay well not real issues, but outrageous teen issues. Just the other day while perusing the internet I came across a disturbing news story that involved a 13 year old teenage girl who had apparently set the record for text messages sent in a month. Then today, while minding my own business, flipping through channels at work came across another story involving “sexting,” the act of sending nude or salacious photos via a pix message.


I was aware of both of these things, incessant text messaging and the sending of nude photos, but was unaware of the level of which they gone. What are these kids crazy? Do they do anything else besides text message? Hey, here’s a big question, where the fuck are the parents? As I get older things like this begin to worry me more. Most of my friends are having children and beginning to raise families, as is my brother so I hope that they can have more control over their children and educate them better than most of these parents out there now.


This father in California realized something was wrong when he received a bill from AT&T which was over 400 pages in length, imagine the envelope? It turns out his ridiculous teenage daughter had sent in the neighborhood of 14,000 text messages (a modern record as far as anyone knows). TO do the math, that is over 400 text messages a day. Huh, 400 a day? Wouldn’t your fingers fall off?


I send what I thought was a lot of text messages. I have never sent more than 500 in one month, which is the limit I have on my plan. I know most people have unlimited text messaging, but I decided to put a limit on myself, knowing that if I ever went over 500 in a month I have a problem. This young lady sends almost that many in a day. While reading the article they talked about a recent survey that states the average teenager (12-18) sends approximately 1,700 text messages a month. I learned from that, that I was nowhere near the textaholic I thought I was. Attached to the article there was a photo of the child’s father playfully trying to grab the phone away from his daughter as she is text messaging. If I was the father this photo would be of me driving a pick ax through her head.


As for “sexting” I am not sure what to say. Again the title of this blog is Parental Control. As a parent I would think you need to have a better understanding of who your kids are and what they are doing with their time. I know it is hard, but it isn’t impossible. I would hope that parents have enough sense to let their children know the consequences of an action like this. That picture gets out to one person, who then shares it with someone else and so on down the line. Then maybe it gets in the hands of the wrong people and gets posted on your schools website or something like that. As a preacher once told me, you can choose your sin but you can’t choose your consequence.


It is said that 1 in 5 high schooler’s has engaged in “sexting.” That is a disturbing number for sure, at least they don’t send 14,000 “sext” messages…..or do they?