(Sue Scheff) Tips for Parents of Teens from Psych Central by Marie Hartwell-Walker, Ed.D

When I decided to hitchhike one day during my high school years, my grandfather was already waiting on the porch when I got home. Radiating disapproval and disappointment, he merely said, “Heard you were needing a ride.” My “driver” had called him as soon as he had let me off. As a girl, I was humiliated and angry (and no, I didn’t try that stunt again). But as a mother of three teens, I have come to appreciate the extra safety that comes from being in a community where people watch out for each other’s kids. As a daring teen, I was lucky to be picked up by a family friend. Although I didn’t understand it at the time, I was also lucky to have adults around me who cared.

The story comes back to me these days as I work to keep my own teenagers safe. Thirty-plus years after my own experiment with “living dangerously,” my community is much bigger and much more anonymous. Although I know literally hundreds of people in my town, it’s also true that I don’t know thousands more. My friends and I certainly do watch out for each other’s kids, but our kids don’t always hang out within our social circle. They explore. They meet new kids. They experiment with new behaviors. Needless to say, this is fine if the kids they look up to are on the honor roll and playing basketball. It’s not at all fine if admission to the group means taking drugs, shoplifting, or violating family rules.

Can parents continue to guide and influence their children through the teen years? Of course. But it takes attention and effort. Parenting well in today’s social climate requires even more patience, vigilance, and involvement than when your children were toddlers. Little kids generally have little challenges and problems in a fairly little world defined by you as parent. Big kids have what are sometimes monumental challenges and problems in a very large and exceedingly complex universe.

Parenting teens well requires that we understand that our job is not about controlling them. It’s about providing them with “training wheels” for life — guidelines that give them protection and experience so that they can develop self-control.

Tips for Parenting Teens in Today’s World

• Get to know the parents of your children’s friends. This is absolutely the most important thing you can do if you want to have access to your children’s world. When your teen begins to “hang” with a new kid, get the phone number, call the parents, and introduce yourself. Make a point of giving the child a ride home so you can walk up to the door and shake the parent’s hand. As soon as the kids start making plans to get together, touch base with the other parent to exchange information about rules regarding curfew, acceptable activities, and supervision. Responses will range from relief that you are as concerned as they are to resentment that you expect parental support and involvement. Parents who are like-minded are going to become part of the support system that keeps your children safe. Parents who either don’t care where their kids are or who think it’s absolutely fine for them to be unsupervised and doing drugs aren’t going to respond well to being asked to be responsible. You may be dismayed but at least you will know where you stand.
• Communicate regularly with those parents. When teens make plans that involve staying at another teen’s house or getting rides to events with other parents, make sure that you have a parent-to-parent communication at some point in the planning process. Make sure that it is really okay with the other parent that your child is sleeping over. They may not even know of the plan! Conversely, make sure that the other parent knows if you are driving their children or dropping them at an event. Again, check for agreement about the level of supervision.
• Establish the “Three W” rule. Teens need to tell you where they are going, who they will be with, and when they will be back. This is not an invasion of privacy; it’s common courtesy. Adult roommates generally do the same for each other. You don’t need minute details, just the broad strokes of what is being planned for the evening. If something comes up, your child can be located. People engaged in “legitimate” activities don’t need to hide their whereabouts.
• Respect privacy, but refuse to accept secretive behavior. It’s important to your teen’s developing sense of independence to have some privacy, but he or she must learn the difference between privacy and secrecy. Your kids do have a right to talk with friends privately, to keep a diary, and to have uninterrupted time alone. But if your teen starts being evasive, get busy. Calmly, firmly, steadily insist that you have a right to know who their friends are and what they are doing together. Talk to teachers about who your kid’s friends are as well and start to build alliances with their parents.
• Talk regularly with your kids about their choice of friends. Kids often don’t realize that they’ve fallen in with bad company. They like to think that they see something positive in a kid that everyone knows is bad news. They may be drawn to the exotic, the different, the risky. They are teens, after all! And part of the job of adolescence is learning how to judge character. Keep lines of communication with your child open so that you can talk about their relationships.
• Support your child’s positive involvement in a sport, art, or activity. Generally, kids who come through the teen years unscathed are those who have a passion about something and who develop a friendship circle around it. This could be the football team, the dance studio, the skateboarding club, or a martial art dojo. It really doesn’t matter what it is, but what does matter is that you get involved. Provide rides. Watch practices, games, and performances. It doesn’t need to take a lot of time or a lot of money to let your teen and his or her friends know that you care. Bring the whole team popsicles on a hot day or hot chocolate on a cold one. Let your child and his or her group know that you are willing to put your time, money, and energy into supporting healthy activity.
• Help your child get a job. If your child spends too much time at loose ends and doesn’t have a sport or an activity, at least get him or her working. A job teaches life skills, eats up idle time, and helps kids feel good about themselves.
• Act swiftly and certainly when something unacceptable happens. Your son isn’t where he said he would be? Go find him. Your daughter’s friend invited a boy into the house when she thought you had gone to sleep? Get dressed and take everybody home. Your kid comes home drunk? Put him or her to bed for the rest of the night, but deal with it first thing in the morning. Be consistently clear, kind, and definite in response to unacceptable behavior and kids will see that you really won’t tolerate it.
• Model adult behavior when you are in conflict with your teen. Whatever you do, don’t yell, threaten, preach, or “lose it” if you don’t like a behavior, a friendship, or how your child interacts with you. You will render yourself totally ineffective with your teen. Your child will take you far more seriously if you insist that the two of you focus on managing the problem instead of yelling at each other.

Remember that your influence depends on your relationship with your child, not your power. You can’t make your child do anything at this stage in life. It won’t help to make threats, to lose your temper, or to try to “ground” or punish a teen. In fact, these tactics tend to spur kids on to greater rebellion as they try to assert their independence.

My grandfather was a proper New Englander: quiet, somewhat stern, and unfailingly kind. I knew that he loved me. Even more important, I knew he trusted me to do the right thing. The reason I didn’t hitchhike again during my teen years was not because I was caught or because I was punished (I wasn’t). I didn’t push my rebellion further because I wanted the respect of my grandfather much more than I needed to demonstrate that I could do what I pleased.

What’s Related

• Other articles by Marie Hartwell-Walker, Ed.D.
• Should Parents Stay with Their Children in Therapy?
• Parents Can Help Teens Reduce Sexual Risk-Taking
• Parenting Angry Teens
• Tips for Talking to Students About a School Shooting
• Teenage Anger
• Teen Depression Symptoms
• Your Teen’s Search for Identity
• The Birds and the Bees: Talking to Young Teens About Sex
• Teenage Depression
• 10 Tips to Build Resilience in Teens and Young Adults

(Sue Scheff) Internet Law – Understanding Internet Defamation by Kelly O’Connell -IBLS INTERNET LAW – NEWS PORTAL

The law of Defamation has come under renewed scrutiny with the advent of the Internet. This is largely because it is the nature of the Internet to give the average, anonymous person an opportunity to express their opinion well-beyond any previously defined venue. Consider the fact that a person of modest means now has the ability to publish a statement, article, or news item across the world in an instant, without an editor checking the facts. Thereafter, the item will linger on the ‘Net for months, or even years, impossible to recover and amend, if the “facts” are erroneous. Therefore, it is inevitable that problems are going to arise.

The main issue to remember when dealing with the Internet is that people still have their basic legal rights intact on the Net, and – likewise – the Internet is not as completely anonymous as the typical person may presumes.

What is Defamation?
The law of defamation has been defined in the West for centuries, and the Internet variety holds to that same basic outline with a few twists. Defamation is the act of making an untrue statement to a third party that damages the subject’s reputation. There are several subcategories of Defamation, being Libel and Slander. Libel is Defaming in a printed forum, such as a newspaper or magazine. Slander is spoken Defamation, and could be made person-to-person, or also broadcast over a radio or television.
Technically, Defamation actionable at law follows this schema:
1. A false and defamatory statement regarding another;
2. Unprivileged publication of the claim to a third party;
3. Rising, in the case of matters of public concern, to at least negligence by the publisher, or worse; and
4. Damages to the subject.

Generally, persons defined as “Public Figures,” have a higher threshold in proving someone committed Defamation against them; that is, the statement must have been made maliciously. There are also four subjects that if falsely dispersed as a fact about another person, are actionable on their face: Attacking a person’s professional character /standing; Alleging an unmarried person is unchaste; Claims a person is infected with a sexually transmitted, or loathsome disease; Claims a person has committed a crime of moral turpitude.

Is Internet Defamation Defined as Slander, Libel or Both?
Until the recent development of “podcasts,” and other types of online videos such as those featured on YouTube, Defamation on the Internet was largely deigned Libel. But whether an online case of accused Defamation should fall under either category of Libel or Slander will not be nearly as meaningful as whether the activity satisfies the basic Defamation criteria, as defined above. What is most important is to focus upon the actual statement, whether verbal or written, that a plaintiff claims is defamatory.
A recently filed case illustrates the application of a libel claim in a blogging case in NY, Stuart Pivar v. Seed Media, 2007cv07334, Filed August 16, 2007, in New York Southern District Court. Seed Media pays PZ Myers to blog at ScienceBlogs.com, and there he reviewed a book by Dr. Stuart Pivar, called “LifeCode: The Theory of Biological Self Organization” which purports to reconfigure Darwinian Evolution.

Myers claimed Pivar is a “classic crackpot” on his http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula website. In response, the lawsuit complaint states, “Myer’s defamatory remarks were made with actual malice; Myers called Plaintiff “a classic crackpot” fully knowing that statement to be false as a statement of fact and in reckless disregard of the truth about Plaintiff because Myer’s knew full well, the time of publishing his defamatory statement that no scientist holding the international reputation of any of Hazen, Sasselov, Goodwin or Tyson would endorse or review the work of a crackpot.”

The complaint claims Myers caused “considerable mental and emotional distress,” tortious interference with the plaintiff’s business relationships as a “scientist and scientific editor,” and “loss of book sales and diminished returns on ten years of funded scientific research in special damages” exceeding $5 million.
The suits asks for: declaratory relief to remove defamatory statements from the web and an injunction to block further libel; $5 million in special damages for “tortious interference with business relations”; and $10 million in damages for defamation, emotional distress, and loss of reputation.
This lawsuit well illustrates the libelous cause, effect and damages of a proper tort case based upon defamation.

Can a Blog Be Sued for Defamation; Isn’t It All Free Speech?
This is a knotty issue, but a short answer would be, generally, that a blog owner whose blog has published obnoxious materials can be held harmless while a blogger using the site can be liable. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 is a protector of blog owners. It states, in section 230, that it “precludes courts from entertaining claims that would place a computer service provider in a publisher’s role.” As to how the court sees blogs, in general, overall, the US Supreme Court has ruled that blogs are similar to news groups, saying “in the context of defamation law, the rights of the institutional media are no greater and no less than those enjoyed by other individuals and organizations engaged in the same activities.”

For bloggers, all Defamation legal rules apply to their posts. But there are many complications in applying them. First, many people who post online comments, and probably those tending to make the most inflammatory and false statements, will do so anonymously, for obvious reasons. So the first threshold is identifying the blogger making Defamatory claims. Several things make this difficult, as well. Since the blogger probably will not identify themselves when the issue comes to light, there needs to be a legal process that allows identification. They can be traced by high-tech means, but a court must agree via summary judgment that all the elements of Defamation have been met. This technology does have some limits, as well, as it can be stymied through use of “Proxies,” which mask the true origin of the blogger. Also, the website owner may not cooperate in the search, as well.

A recent case showed how powerful Defamation laws, applied online, can be. In November 2006, a Florida woman, Sue Scheff, was awarded $11.3 million in damages in Broward County Circuit Court, in one of the biggest awards ever tolled. The suit was filed for Internet defamation, and the jury found a Louisiana woman had posted caustic messages against the Scheff and her company, claiming she was a “con artist” and “fraud”. The jury found the charges were completely false, so the Louisiana woman had no defense. Interestingly, Scheff’s attorney had offered to settle the case for $35,000 before it went before the jury.

 

(Sue Scheff) The INTERNET DIVIDE by Connect with Kids

“They do it so fast, that lingo goes by so fast, you don’t know what they are saying. I mean she’s got three people on here right now. I couldn’t tell you how she’s keeping up those conversations.”

– Roopa Bhandari, mother, discussing her daughter’s online Instant Messaging

<!–a href=”#” mce_href=”#” target=”_blank”></a–>Are most kids more Internet savvy than their parents? A new Harris poll says the answer is yes. Are kids doing things online that would upset their parents? It seems that answer is also yes.

Sonia uses shorthand to chat with her friends online.
 
“LOL is laughing out loud, BRB — be right back, BBL — be back later, and LMHO –laughing my head off,” says Sonia, 13.

She’s so fast, it’s hard for her mom to keep up.

“They do it so fast, that lingo goes by so fast, you don’t know what they are saying. I mean, she’s got three people on here right now. I couldn’t tell you how she’s keeping up those conversations,” says Roopa Bhandari, Sonia’s mother.

According to the latest Harris poll, parents think their kids are online a total of six hours a week, but kids say they’re on the Internet almost twice that long. Almost a quarter of the kids admit to behavior that would upset their parents: talking to strangers, looking at porn, cyberbullying. This is today’s digital divide, with kids on one side, inexperienced parents on the other.

“I think the naivety in a lot of senses is really unnecessary, because it’s not as hard as it looks to a lot of these parents, they just have to take initiative and they have to go for it and make sure that their kids are safe,” says Jamey Brown, Systems Administrator, Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).

That means keeping the computer in an open area, using Internet filters and learning as much as you can.

“Education of the parents is absolutely essential, because if the kids have a strong desire to do these kinds of things, then they’re going to find ways around even some of the best protections. If they are more knowledgeable than their parents on even the software that’s being used to circumvent them, then it can really work against [parents],” says Brown.

And learning can start with simple questions and conversations.

“Who’s ACL7C?” asks Sonia’s mom.
 “My friend at school,” Sonia answers.
“What’s her name?” 
“Emily.”

While her mother is trying to learn, Sonia would still like to keep some things private.

“It’s half and half. It’s good that she’s aware of some of the stuff, but not all of it,” says Sonia.

Tips for Parents

• The Internet can be a wonderful resource for kids. They can use it to research school reports, communicate with teachers and other kids, and play interactive games. (Nemours Foundation) However, it also provides access to information, sites, pictures and people that can be harmful to children and teens. 
• It’s important to be aware of what your children see and hear on the Internet, who they meet, and what they share about themselves online. (Nemours Foundation)
• Just like any safety issue, it’s a good idea to talk with your kids about your concerns, take advantage of resources to protect them from potential dangers, and keep a close eye on their activities. (Nemours Foundation)
• Keep the computer in a common area, not in individual bedrooms, where you can watch and monitor your child. (Nemours Foundation)
• Encourage your teen to follow simple precautions, such as remaining anonymous at all times (this includes chat rooms); never disclosing private information such as address, phone number, school name, and credit card numbers; and never agreeing to meet someone in person that you have met in a chat room. (Nemours Foundation)

References

• Nemours Foundation

Sue Scheff: Continuing to be a Voice Against Internet Defamation!

THE FIGHT AGAINST INTERNET DEFAMATION STRENGTHENS! As attorney’s and judges are reviewing these cases, the recognition for action is loud and clear. Fight back – it is your right!

Recently I have personally meet with both a prominent Senator and a Judge. Both were completely astonished at the reckless regard for the truth that lingers on the Internet and agree, it is time to fight back!

Sue Scheff: Continuing to be a voice for parents

As a Parent Advocate, I will continue to help educate parents today on teen issues that were not part of the previous generations.  Please visit my recent Blog of many news articles and magazine articles focused on bringing awareness to today’s teen struggles and how to become an educated parent.

 Click Here.