A girl, trying to impress her new boyfriend, snaps a naked photo of herself and texts it to him. A few weeks later, they break up, and he forwards the photo to another girl who used to be friendly with the first girl, but not anymore. That new recipient then forwards the photo to every single person on her contact list and the picture, originally meant for the eyes of one boy only, is sent to hundreds, perhaps thousands of other students. Law enforcement is summoned, criminal charges are considered, lives are changed, and reputations are damaged with repercussions that can last a lifetime.
This is a true story, as told on the front page of the New York Times on Sunday, March 27. It happened in the state of Washington, in a suburb of Olympia, the capital, but the scary thing is that it could have happened anywhere. Even scarier? All the kids involved were in middle school, eighth grade, and the major players were only 14 years old.
“Kids today are influenced by social media such as Facebook and YouTube, pop music, TV shows, movies, and celebrities in the news, as well as their peers. We want our kids to feel confident in making decisions based on family values and open conversations in their homes,” says Ellen Burgess, a guidance counselor at Community Middle School in Plainsboro, who acknowledges that middle school children experience a wide range of physical and emotional changes and challenges. This is magnified by the fact that they are growing up wired, online, and plugged in, with easy access to pornography and other graphic content on the Internet.
Add to the mix cyberbullying, which put the West Windsor Plainsboro School District in the international spotlight last year when Rutgers student Tyler Clementi committed suicide after his roommate, a WW-P graduate, allegedly posted a secretly recorded video of Clementi’s private moments online. For parents it can be alarming to observe the speed and ease with which a child can get into trouble as a result of a bad decision, especially in situations where sex and technology converge.
“Parents navigating the choppy waters of adolescence need to be helpful and sensitive and at the same time, provide discipline, structure, and guidance,” says Colleen Pedersen, another CMS guidance counselor.
To help parents address the challenges of raising kids in a hyper-technologized world, the CMS guidance department presents “Yikes! Kids Are Doing WHAT?!,” a lecture and discussion by Elizabeth Casparian, PhD, executive director of HiTOPS Adolescent Health and Education Center in Princeton, Thursday, April 7, 7 to 9 p.m., in the Commons at Community Middle School, 55 Grovers Mill Road in Plainsboro.
“The time to start helping our children communicate is in middle school when the most pertinent issues are about their relationships with their peers,” says Casparian. “So much in middle school is about things like who is popular and who is not, but it’s important to begin working with kids on these concepts because these kinds of issues are precursors to bigger issues like relationships and peer pressure that happens later.”
Casparian plans to cover a wide scope of adolescent issues in her April 7 program at CMS. She says one of the biggest issues today is bullying, and whether it is your own child being bullied or bullying others, it is a serious problem, especially when it overlaps into the area of sexuality at a time when children are just starting to become aware of their own bodies changing and are beginning to think about relationships.
“One of the most common ways adolescents bully each other is to call one another gay,” says Casparian. “It’s considered one of the worst insults we can call someone. And if you don’t go along with the homophobia, you get called gay too. And even if kids are not truly homophobic, they may say ‘that’s so gay’ or ‘he’s so gay,’ and then say ‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’ But it perpetuates an ongoing belief that it’s okay to use gay as a discriminatory term. We live in an environment where there is so much violence against those perceived as different, there’s a real need for kids to have explicit education.”
Casparian says that part of the problem is that in well-educated communities, there are people who have strong beliefs on both sides about sexual orientation. “There are those who believe that sexual orientation is a choice and that choosing to be gay is blasphemous and wrong. If you grow up in an environment where there is a strong cultural value against homosexuality, that is hard to counter. How are you going to learn that what you’re doing or saying isn’t going to be hurtful?”
The WW-P school district has had a policy and corresponding regulation in place for many years that acknowledges that many hate crimes are committed by children who are often motivated by ignorance as much as by hate, or by the desire to attract attention to themselves with something they consider a prank, without any actual harm or malice intended.
Just like the title of Casparian’s talk, parents of middle and high schoolers want to know, “Yikes, are kids really having sex?” Parents may be relieved to find out that, according to Casparian, there’s more talk than real action. “There’s a lot of posturing, particularly in high school. We are not inundated with young high school students coming to us for sexual health services, including (services related to) pregnancy, birth control, and sexually transmitted diseases. We see a certain number of 15 and 16-year-olds coming for sex education, but the majority of the kids we’ve been seeing for the past five or six years who are sexually active are 18 to 21-year-olds”
A new national study just released last month by the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reported that U.S. teens and young people are indeed, “doing it less,” with 27 percent of young men and 29 percent of young women reporting no sexual contact.
Casparian believes that the trend of “doing it less” is partly attributable to good education programs about sex, safety, and responsibility. “I believe young people are getting the message, and they’re making decisions to postpone sexual involvement until they’re older.”
Parents of middle-schoolers may be relieved to learn Casparian and other HiTOPS counselors are seeing a lot of talk but very little actual sex happening in the greater Princeton, West Windsor and Plainsboro area, just as with high-schoolers. “There’s a lot of so-called dating (in middle school), but they don’t really go anywhere,” says Casparian. “They may sit at the same lunch table, posturing, and trying to understand what it feels like.”
Parents should understand they have myriad opportunities to share positive information with their children, according to Casparian, so they should not be afraid to be the loudest voice, the person their kids want to go to if they want to ask a question. “Get over blushing talking about periods, intercourse, and condoms. If you don’t want to be that person, where would you want them to go, who else would you want them to talk to? Push your boundaries verbally with your children. It’s a great opportunity to share your values, so seize the moments that open up. If they’re talking in the car, if they’re talking about something that happened in school, or watching TV, you can say, ‘what do you think about that?’”
Casparian has other tips for parents to help them open up the conversation:
Give your child a book. “The book I recommend most often is ‘It’s Perfectly Normal’ by Robie Harris, great for middle school kids. It tells them the information is okay for you to have and (sends the message) ‘I want to make it available to you.’ Let them know your questions are normal. Read the book yourself to make sure you’re comfortable with the content.”
Ask questions and listen. “Kids only take in what they can put into context. If you share information with a child who is not interested in sex, they’re not going to hear it. It should never just be one talk, ‘The Talk.’ It’s all about hearing it and talking about it as you go along. If you do that starting early, they’ll remember how babies are made and as they get older they will ask more questions as they come up.”
Casparian says don’t forget to be the most important thing you can be to your children; their parents. “I don’t think it’s necessary to be cool parents. I don’t need to let kids misbehave or drink at my house. Being cool isn’t as helpful or valuable to your kid as being a parent who creates limits and boundaries. That’s safety for kids. When kids come to your house, when they know there are interruptions, they know they’re safe, and it’s reassuring, especially for middle school kids and young high school kids too. There’s pressure for parents to be cool but parents are supposed to be adults. Discipline means to teach, not to punish. Teach your children decision-making skills, teach them about consequences, and the difference between right and wrong. Set limits, and when they cross those limits, let them understand there will be consequences.”
“Yikes! Kids Are Doing What?” Community Middle School, Grovers Mill Road, Plainsboro. Thursday, April 7, 7 p.m. Lecture and discussion presented by Elizabeth Casparian, director of HiTOPS teen health and education center in Princeton. For more information about HiTOPS call 609-683-5155 or visit www.hitops.org. 609-716-5300 or www.ww-p.org
