Parenting Teens? There's An App For That!

Growing up in New York City, I had a lot of autonomy. With my monthly bus pass (in the coolest bus pass holder ever — trust me — bright purple, bought at a tiny stationery store on 61st and Central Park West), I was pretty much my own keeper. As long as I stuck to the MTA's web of 150 or so bus lines, I could go anywhere, anytime ... anonymously.

It's not so easy for my daughter here in our tiny town north of Boston. Oh sure, she has a driver's license now, which does mean more freedom for her (and more free time for me), but there's always the discussion around which car she should take. "I think the Acura's getting a flat, take the Miata." Most days I still pick her up after school, and her schedule is so densely packed that there's very little opportunity for her to go all Thelma and Louise on me. Basically, she drives a half hour to the stable, a half hour back. Otherwise she's either working with her horse, working at a part-time job, or working on homework.

(BTW, do we see a theme here? With all that "working," it's no wonder she rolls her eyes if anyone implies that high school should be the time of her life. I just hope she hasn't burned out completely before she heads to college.)

I typically do know where my teen is, but I know a lot of other mothers who don't. Maybe their kids aren't as over committed as mine. And it can definitely be a worry. The world is big and our children are small. Well, at this stage, they're not really. But, we still think of them that way.

Microchipping is tempting, but not readily available yet. 

Calm down, my conspiracy theorist friends. I'm only kidding. 

Not that the concept is far-fetched or even unlikely at some point in the future. Reality-show host Troy Dunn (“APB with Troy Dunn”) says “I only support GPS chip monitoring for convicted felons while in prison and on parole; for sex offenders forever; and for children if parents opt in. I am adamantly against the chipping of anyone else.”

Phew! I feel better now. (WTF!)

So what's a nervous mother to do? Fortunately, we live in a world of ubiquitous smartphones and countless apps. There are several designed to help us keep tabs on our offspring:

Find My Kids — Footprints
Real-time GPS tracking of your teens and their movements. You can track them individually or coordinate with the locations of other (also tracked) teens. Creepy.

Family Tracker
A similar system lets you track the entire family. It includes built-in messaging and "a loud annoying siren" feature if you need to get someone's attention. Whoa!

SecuraFone
This takes GPS tracking to another level (and one, admittedly, that may be of great interest to those of us parenting new drivers). Not only do you know where your kids have gone — you know how fast they drove to get there!

iCam

Of course, you can't always be home when they are. This is a webcam video streaming app that lets you spy on ... er, I mean ... monitor your teens in their rooms, your kitchen, or anywhere you put a camera.

'Don't know whether it's because I'm a liberal or because I've read too many dystopian novels. But, to my mind, all of these fairly reek of "big brother." Plus, my daughter already has enough reasons to roll her eyes and resent me. There is one app that struck a chord though. Heres' why.

I'm not a control freak. Not really. (Okay, I am, BUT I generally do control those control freak controlling tendencies.) What I really want is to be able to connect with my teen. To ask where she is and when she'll be home. Because always I care and because sometimes I actually need to know. The problem is, my daughter doesn't always "hear" my call or sometimes "see" my text. (Um, right, okay, if she says so.) That leads me to the app:

Ignore No More

No tracking, no spying. This app hits kids where they live ... on their phones! It's very simple. If your teen doesn't answer when you call them, you automatically and remotely disable their phone. They can't make or get a call (except to 911). They can't text. They can't use Facebook or Instagram. Once they call you back, they're back — to smartphone business as usual.

Bottom line? They're at your mercy. Bah ha ha ha ha ha ha. (Insert evil mom laugh here.) The name says it all. They can ignore you no more. And the beauty is, in a world with so few consequences, you can actually follow-through. "Call me back or else ..." 

Or, you can always go ahead and get that microchip.

If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to order a copy of Lovin' the Alien at www.lovinthealien.com.  

Un-app-etizing News

Y'know how everyone is a perfect parent ... until they actually are a parent? When we were "dinks" (dual-income, no kids), my husband and I found it very easy to pass judgement on our friends who had already taken the parental plunge. We would never let our toddler eat junk food between meals. We would never be bullied into anything by a six-year old. We would never let our fifth grader wear something like that to school. 

We would never let our teenager have unlimited access to iPhone apps.

Actually, that last one wasn't on our mind at all. Our friends who had children five and ten years before us didn't face the same challenges we do where personal electronics are concerned. Sure they had PCs, but the whole smartphone thing is a fairly new phenomenon. And one that makes it fairly difficult (read, impossible) to assert any kind of authority or control.

There was a time (not so long ago) when I was feeling rather self-satisfied that my teen daughter and I were Facebook friends. Let me tell you ... Facebook is so yesterday! Sure, my daughter is still on Facebook (you sort of have to be), but her activity there is fairly superficial: sharing photos from horse events, wishing people "Happy Birthday." Her real life (well, her real digital life) takes place elsewhere.

Here are some of the latest apps that have replaced Facebook in terms of teen activity. If you don't know them, don't worry, your kids do. 

Oh wait, strike that. If you don't know them, your kids do. Go ahead and worry.

Snapchat
Kids can post pictures that then "disappear." In theory, this makes the app safer than a more permanent place like Facebook. In reality, it encourages otherwise cautious kids to experiment with sexting and bullying. And, guess what? Nothing on the Internet ever really goes away.

Burn Note
This one's the same premise as Snapchat but with text messages instead of pictures. Same benefits. Same issues.

Kik
A popular messaging app with 120 million (MILLION!) users, Kik "lets you connect with all your friends, no matter how you meet them – at school, on your favorite social app, or in an online game." Your username can be whatever you like, which encourages anonymity (and all the questionable behavior that tags along with it). Since no one knows who you really are, it's a great place for pedophiles. Bonus!

Ask.fm
Another anonymous site (do we see a pattern emerging?), Ask.fm lets users post questions and answers. Great for sharing information, right? Great also for bullying, unfortunately. Although the site is based in Latvia, it's very popular with teens in the U.K. And, sadly, there have been several suicides there linked to it.

Yik Yak
Another anonymous site (yes, definitely a pattern), Yik Yak is in some ways even worse because it geotargets users. You see comments posted by people in your own community — in most cases, your high school. This "local bulletin board" brings the bullying right into your backyard.

I've just scratched the surface here. There are so many others (and, sadly, more being developed every day). Vine, Wanelo, Oovoo, Tumblr, Omegle, Pheed, Instagram, Whisper, Speak Freely, the list goes on and on.

If you have the wherewithal, ask your daughter or son to give you a tour of their smartphone. Then again, if they know you're coming, they can easily hide any apps they don't want you to see. In fact, there's an app for that. It's called ...

Poof.

If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to order a copy of my new book Lovin' the Alien at www.lovinthealien.com. 

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Spell Like 'Em

In 2008, Barack Obama was elected the first African-American President. He also became the first President elect who had successfully used the Internet, social and viral media in his campaign. He even had an app.


As you can't help but know (since the 2012 election coverage started long before 2012 started and is on pretty much 24/7), Mitt Romney is hoping to unseat President Obama this November. He is attacking the President's attempts at healthcare reform and economic stimulus. He thinks Obama needs to "Stop apologizing for America." And, like any self-respecting candidate in this Web 3.0 world, he created an app for it:


A Better Amercia


A-M-E-R-C-I-A. With that rather un-patriotic error, Romney has generated quite a lot of online buzz ... and not exactly the buzz he intended.


The world being what it is, the mistake was instantaneously picked up, ridiculed and memed. Memes are clever (and, granted, sometimes less-than-clever) online parodies. In the case of Romney's ill-fated app, the memes include his misspelled call for betterment coupled with a Scrabble game, a child struggling in a spelling bee, Bart Simpson, refrigerator magnet letters that read "DUMBASS," and, of course, an Etch-a-Sketch.


Poor Mitt. Poor proofreaders who work for Mitt! I'm an advertising copywriter by trade and I can tell you that these things happen. In fact, as someone who makes a living with words, I can only thank my lucky stars that I wasn't the person who mistyped or approved that one.


Then again, if Romney's purpose is to be seen as young and hip and social media-savvy, this may have been the ultimate Freudian slip. If you are reaching out to the texters and the tweeters, don't you need to talk their talk? Type their type? Or rather, typo their typo?


To the online generation, accurate spelling is a grossly overrated virtue. They simply don't have time for anything that gets in the way of speeding thumbs on a smartphone keypad. When I read the Facebook posts of my daughter and her friends, I cringe. And it takes superhuman mom effort to resist correcting her text messages. 


Amercia's a free country; there's no law against poor spelling. Why not go all the way then? Campaign posters should use acronyms (WTF! OMG!) and emoticons, drop letters, replace simple words with numeric digits (à la the Dictionary According to the Artist 4-merly Known as Prince), and avoid punctuation altogether unless it's to reinforce the candidate's point with a string of countless exclamation marks.


There are those who will criticize Romney for his new allegiance to Amercia. There are those who will think that those who criticize him are nit-picking. There are those who will think that those who criticize those who criticize are actually ignoring the real issues. But, let's all just admit that we love our country, no matter how we spell it. 


Here's what I say: gd bls amercia!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!