Young Emerging Leaders

Last night, I sauntered up the stairs to kiss my 11 year old goodnight.  When I arrived at his half-opened door, I was horrified to see some man dressed in a garder and hot pink top being cuffed and stuffed into the back of a police car on his television screen. 

"Malcolm!"  I gasped.

"Oh...Mom..." he stuttered as he fumbled his remote control while trying to change the channel to "Suite Life of Jack and Cody" (a Disney show). 

"You know that you aren't supposed to be watching that channel!  What do you think you're doing?"

"I-I was just flipping through..." he stammered.

I know I didn't just catch him smoking or doing some sort of illegal drug, but this was totally out of character for Malcolm and the fact that he strayed from MY concept of him as a child.  My concept was, in a word, arrested because I see him as my child...my baby.  Truth is, he's not a baby...he's almost a teen and in this day and age...he's at risk of being swayed toward illegal drugs, sex and other "parental horrors".  It's my job to prove to him that I can be approached about ANYTHING he may be curious about and it's my job to prevent him from being exposed to anything that is harmful.

When I say it's my job, I don't mean that it's my job when I think about it.  This FULL TIME JOB is 24/7 and I dropped the ball last night by trusting that my "baby" will always be just that...a baby.  That said, I redeemed myself by taking the responibility of proper television viewing away from my 11 year old (where it should never have been) and placed it on my own plate by enabling the V-CHIP.

You see, I give my oldest certain freedoms because he is uncommonly mature and responsible...these qualities have the disarming nature to cause me to forget that he is, in fact, an 11 year old boy.  So, I have to follow that age old sentiment: "All things in moderation". 

The V-Chip is easy to enable.  It's on most televisions in the menu and parental control section.  My son's television was restricted by clicking on the menu button, clicking on the parental controls button, selecting and confirming a password and then selecting the ratings from Y to NR.  Malcolm admitted that he was curious and we had a rather uncomfortable conversation about cross dressing, but, in the end all ended well.

I wrote this because too often parents are caught operating on "auto pilot" through parenthood and the consequences are much more severe.  Some parents acutally loose their children to death dealt by predators, other violence, drugs etc..  Not all of the cases are or were preventable, but for the small amount that were, it must be gut wrenching to realize that the prevention of one's own child's injury sat soley with one's self. 

I got off easy with a slap on the wrist and I'm thankful for that.  I just wanted to share this with everyone to remind parents to be viligant in the watch over their children so that they don't get caught up in life's dangers before we can prepare them for those dangers.

Best wishes to you and yours,

Dawn