Report Inappropriate Comments

As a parent I cannot stress the importance of being aware of what your children are doing - I don't mean putting them in a 24/7 bubble and hiding them from the world, I also don't mean attending some speech on web safety that will not resonate with your child or with you.

Even at the age of 18 children (yes, I am committing the sin of generalization) have not acquired much wisdom. Partly because our methods of parenting for the last few generations has really sucked but mostly because they are still children.

Thinking before you post, thinking about what you are posting, thinking about how people will respond to your post is beyond the ability of most adults let alone children who are desperate to get some form of positive or even negative validation on (anti)social-media.

Us parents - that give a damn about our kids - should parent by example (meaning don't post every knee jerk reaction to Insta-Face-itter, we should also not be afraid to infringe on their privacy and monitor what they are posting and correcting the bad behavior ( sorry, I am a believer in the benevolent dictator form of parenting. They can have rights when they have earned them - by showing they are responsible - and merely existing isn't earning). If the parents of the "problem child" or root cause child of these problems had been paying attention to what their kids were doing on (anti)social-media then both of the situations would have never happened.

Am I blaming the parents? Yep, sure am. Which means when my kids post something stupid (which has happened I am sad to say) I believe it is my job to be the very first person to tell them that they just did something stupid and why (which I was)!