What the world needs now.

This post at Wizbang recently commented on the story you probably heard about the 15 year girl who 'serviced' five guys on the hockey team in the locker room at Milton Academy in Massachusetts.

Wizbang also added this:

"It seems that two weeks after locker room incident, the same five hockey players attended a "Sweet Sixteen" birthday party in a Boston hotel for a female student. The theme of the party (in a suite reserved paid for by a student's parent) was obvious from the get-go; guests were greeted by two topless girls at the door, including Monica, and there was plenty of booze around. The phrase "drunken orgy" certainly seems to apply."

Commenters on the piece blamed bad parenting mostly. Anyone who has read my blog regularly knows how I feel about the culture of sex we are raising our kids in. Adults care more about what they want than what kids need. It is as simple as that. From TV to movies to music, trying to keep your kids from the overtly sexual world we live in is like trying to keep them dry with a blanket in a rainstorm. No matter what you do they are still going to get soaking wet.

2 years ago when my oldest teenager started using IM alot, I got a screen name too. TheBestMomITW. Pretty soon all his friends knew it and they told their friends because they thought it so weird that an adult would get on IM. Most teens seem to think the internet belongs to them.

Anyway, what happened was totally unexpected. All these teen started IMing me. Not just my son's friends. I don't know where they all came from, but I probably had about 40 IMing me regularly. It was a mix of boys and girls and it became pretty obvious from the beginning that all they wanted was some adult attention. They wanted someone to listen to them who was older and could give them some advice. I learned a alot more from them.

I learned that the teen years are a natural time of starting to let go of your parents and because of that, there are fights and anger and the kid has no one to go to. I learned that divorce has to be the most painful thing a child can experience and affects them as nothing else in their young life. I learned that drugs such as pot and esctasy are commonly used by the good and bad kids. I learned that it is not umcommon for girls to "service" their boyfriends because it "wasn't sex" and they couldn't get pregnant and it made the boys happy. I also learned that most parents don't a clue to what is going on, even when they think they do.

Needless to say I had a lot to say to all of that. I was like online therapist. Many problems I had to refer to professionals. I would find the places or people they needed to speak to and give them the phone numbers. There was parental abuse and drug abuse and depression. I tried to get them to let me talk to their parents but that was NOT going to happen. I truly don't think most adults understand or know the vile swamp of immorality that our kids are swimming in.

It finally became too much for me. It was upsetting and my son didn't like me knowing about everything that was going on at his school either. So I just stopped going on AIM. Now I am on MSN and I go by another screenname. But those kid's problems are all kid's problems and that haunts me.

I live in a nice area with good schools and still we have these problems. It isn't a lack of money, and in most cases the parents do care, they are just busy working. The schools are too big for teachers to keep track of everyone much less have a real interest in the kids. When it comes to all the teacher/student affairs you have heard recently, I feel the kids are drawn to any adult willing to give them attention and who they are attracted to. The difference is the adult use to be able to draw the line. But our culture seems to have blurred the line and only the legal system seems to be able keep the line there at all.

I have thought about this alot. And the only solution I can come up with is the only one that would work. First the public must demand that the restrictions on movies be adhered to even in the rental stores. 2nd, we adults need to stop going to movies that sexualize kids and show too much immoral sexual behavior. If an adult wants to see that, there are movies to rent at adult movie stores. Let's keep our mainstream movies and TV pretty clean. Our kids will always have access to them no matter what parents do. We need to stop watching the shows that do this on TV as well. Good movies and good shows can still be good without the over the top sexual references and scenes. With Hollywood it is all about supply and demand. We don't need censorship, or the government stepping in. We need to just stop going to the movies that we think would be wrong for our teenagers to see, because THEY WILL SEE THEM. Same with TV shows. Trust me, if Hollywood sees that we want a cleaned up version of entertainment, they will do it. It is all about the $$$.

Yes, we need better parenting, but the kids today are the parents of tomorrow. Do you think they will be any better? Every generation seems to sink lower and lower in their standards of behavior. I'm not totally blaming what we see and hear on TV and movies and music. But from what I heard from those kids, it is a big part. We can't make parents spend time with their kids, but we can help change the culture that surrounds the kids. Maybe you don't want to give up easy access to what you enjoy, but can't we for once think of the kids first? If yall have any more suggestions I would be glad to hear them.