Stella Damasus

... Now, how many children between the ages of nine and 14 who visit the internet have the strong will power to say, no I am not going into this site because I know it is bad. Let’s be honest, how many of our kids can actually say “it doesn’t matter if I am alone; I am not going into this site.” As far as they are concerned, I’m not doing anything bad, I’m not trying it out with anybody, I am just looking, and it’s easy because they are not paying for the internet, their parents made it available, it is free for them, they can look and once a child goes into such sites it arouses them, it makes them so excited that at any opportunity they have when they are alone, they would try to see more. It is research that has been done and science has proven that once the human mind absorbs things that can do things to the body especially at that age that is new to them and they can’t control the feelings that they are getting, the excitement that is derived from those feelings will drive them to do more.
I am just saying that we should take out time to monitor what our kids are exposed to. Especially those of us that have cable that have parental control that would prevent the kids from watching programs that are above their age, not by leaving them to chance and talking but by doing it yourself and make sure that they don’t have access to some particular channels and programs. Same goes for the internet, it is very important that we monitor the kind of things they are exposed to. If you decide to restrict your children from internet access totally, there’s an alternative means of doing research because laptops now can have different educational applications installed on them for different topics like Math’s, Geography, General Knowledge and so many more just so that you are rest assured that the only things your kids have access to are these applications. Even though I don’t know much about technology now, I have been told that they have created a lot of things for children to protect them from a lot so that you don’t have to be afraid about what they are exposed to.

I’m just advising that we take time out to find out what recent technology is available now that will help our children and prevent them from being exposed to all these things.
 I’m sorry to say this knowing that I might offend a lot of people, but I also do not subscribe to parents giving their children Blackberry Smart phones before they are 15 or 16 because as adults most of us already have issues with the kind of chats we have on BB. It makes people closer to you than necessary, it is so informal and playful that you can send just one emoticon and you are already sending a signal to someone. You can lead someone on and flirt without even realizing what you are doing and it is so fast with Blackberry. If we are going to be honest with ourselves, there are some people on our BB’s that we always press ‘End Chat’ because we don’t want other people to see the kind of conversations we have had with those people even though those conversations are not really bad but the fact that you are allowing someone BB you at certain odd times and use certain words and certain emoticons on you and you find yourself responding because you don’t want to be rude, that in itself as an adult is not that easy to handle on less you are a very strict person , you decide to delete people if you have nothing important to say or you decide not to respond to unimportant messages but our children who are very impressionable and vulnerable at that age, that are ready to explore and have started to come to terms with the changes in their bodies, the feelings that they are getting all of a sudden, the spots in their body that arouse them that they didn’t know before now.

Imagine what they would go through if they have Blackberry’s, all it takes is for them to give their pins to anyone that asks and you don’t have to know. It happens in Church, it happens in school, it happens at the mall, it happens in the cinema, anywhere really. All it takes is for someone to pass a paper to a kid and say cram this number, and we know that kids cram things easily and before you know it they cram the pin, they invite you and you start to talk crap and the next thing you are meeting the person somewhere or in school and we don’t even bother to check what our children go to school with, what they come back with. Some of our children take gadgets to school that they have no business taking there, some of them take extra clothes to school, believe me younger girls are doing this now and younger boys are carrying things that show them pictures that are nude everywhere they go. We just don’t care anymore because we believe that with the money that we have we can afford all these things, we can keep them busy, we can buy them everything that they ask for just so that they can get off our backs so we can have more time to work, then you spend most of your time working and little or no time with your children then we wonder why the children that belong to the rich parents are the ones committing all these offences and crimes. They are not committing these crimes because they need money, they are doing it for experiment, they do it most of the time for attention but the wrong kind of attention and sometimes they do it out of habit because they’ve been doing it since they were kids and nobody noticed and they do it for fun.

So please, my advice is let us all be careful with what we expose our children to, let us know what our children are looking for on the internet, let’s not expose them to Blackberry’s before they are old enough to handle whatever is coming with it. Whatever it is that we can do to help our children and work with them as much as we can, let us try and do it. It is left for us to make sure that the future generations are doing what they are supposed to do. It’s up to us to make sure that the generation coming after us right the wrongs in our society and fix the things that have been destroyed already.

Stella's Quote of the day: If you suspect your teenager is involved in an unhealthy relationship or activity, ask and talk about it. Don’t be afraid to be involved in your child’s life, find out all you can because unwelcome action may prevent unpredictable tragedy.