Petula Dvorak, writing in the Washington Post, comments on the horrifying tale of the 13-year-old Virginia girl who left home to meet someone she met on a dating app, and whose body was subsequently found. Two Virginia Tech students are in custody in connection with the murder. Dvorak:
Police told Nicole’s mom, Tammy Weeks, that they think the sweet-faced girl met Eisenhauer online.
The details of that are still unclear, but here’s what we know for sure: Nicole led an active, imaginary life online, meeting people on Kik, a messaging app that has been the bane of law enforcement officials for the past couple of years.
The app grants users anonymity, it allows searches by age and lets users send photos that aren’t stored on phones.
It’s popular with tweens and teens — and predators.
“Unfortunately, we see it every day,” said Lt. James Bacon, head of the Fairfax County Police Department’s child exploitation unit.
Every day. More:
This shadow world may be where Eisenhauer met Nicole, police told her mother. “It was some off-the-wall site I never heard of,” Weeks said in an interview with The Washington Post.
In the digital age, any parent can be Tammy Weeks. Smartphones have made it easier to keep tabs on our children — and much, much harder.
Teens have been outmaneuvering their mothers and fathers for decades. Back in my day, we told our parents we were spending the night at Melanie’s house when we were really at the Echo and the Bunnymen show an hour away, Ferris Buellering our way through adolescence.
But a lot of times, our parents won, because they caught us sneaking out. Or they called Melanie’s mom.
This world? The predators aren’t just hiding behind the Galaga machine at the arcade. They’re in our kids’ pockets, in their backpacks, in their bedrooms.
Whole thing here. Dvorak says “it’s not okay to play the Luddite.” Oh? Why not? How have we managed to convince ourselves that our children need smartphones? It’s a lie. You know what it is? Parents don’t want to go against the flow. Every other parent is letting their kids have smartphones, and parents don’t want to be thought poorly of by their kids or the other parents. It really is hard to tell your kids “no” about this stuff, and to keep telling them no, every damn day. Believe me, I know this firsthand. I’m no model parent in this regard. But I’ll tell you this: our younger kids do not have smartphones, and will not have them, even though a lot of kids their age — 9 and 12 — have them. You can install things to protect your kids, and you should. But I cannot see any good reason why a child that young should have a smartphone.
Some dear friends are going through hell right now because of some social media mess their adolescent got mixed up in. It scares the crap out of me, to be honest. Everybody thinks it won’t happen to them. But it can, and it does. A lawyer friend, a mom, was telling me not long ago that she tried to show a relative of hers who lets his young kids have smartphones how easy it is for them to google extremely harmful content online. It did no good. Me, I think people like me, well-meaning parents, live in denial, telling ourselves that our kids aren’t going to misuse their smartphones, because we find it too hard to say no to them. (The same is true with television too, by the way.)
I don’t have the time or the skills to monitor everything my kids would get into on their smartphones, if they had them, and access to social media. But you know what? Why should I. They are nine and 12 years old. They have no business with smartphones, Instagram accounts, Facebook, Snapchat, and all the rest. They are not ready for those things. I certainly would not have been at that age. You give your kids a smartphone with access to the Internet and social media, you are handing them grenades.
It is hard as hell to be a countercultural parent. But what else is there?
UPDATE: I made a funny mistake here — read “Petula Dvorak” and wrote it as “Petula Clark.” Thanks to the reader who corrected me.