Responsibility

Responsibility is something that is taught by parents, bosses, friends, family, pretty much anyone significant in your life. It’s something that has become lacking in our society today. With kids growing up with some sort of technology in there hands, someone needs to claim the responsibility and the potential consequences.

If a parent is giving a child a phone, the parent needs to realize what potentially could happen in those naive, adolescent hands. Cell phones are not what they used to be when I was growing up; texting was done in T9 and there was no such thing as selfies, so there wasn’t much I could do on it, other than contact the people I needed to. Now phones are mini computers at your fingertips, making anything and everything easily accessible. Parents need to realize that giving a child a phone is giving them the freedom to post whatever they want, to send anything to whomever they want, and to look up whatever they want. Therefore, I believe that the parent should force rules for use of the new phone.

It’s the parents responsibility to make sure that the child does what he/she is supposed to do with the phone. Website blocks, controlled downloads of apps, social media watching — these are simple things that a parent could implement that could save a child from posting something they shouldn’t. With sexting being as popular as it is today, parents need to monitor that as well by installing apps that will send a parent pictures that their child takes. This forces the child to be smarter about what pictures he/she would post or send out.

To be honest, if a child is prosecuted for something like sexting, I believe that the parent should be as equally responsible as the child, because the parents gave them the phone without teaching their child about the responsibility it takes to have a phone. If given the freedom to do as they please, most children will act before they think about the possible consequences. And to me, that lesson should be taught by the parents.