Good Lord. Fourteen year old kids are sexting? Great parenting.
Could parents control juvenile crime?
Could parents control kids who wanted to act out at school?
Could parents control kids who wanted to shoplift?
Could parents control everything their kids were determined to do?
You can raise five kids the same way, four turn out great and one doesn’t have the judgement God gave a gnat.
Don’t get the idea this is a parent’s fault.
In this hectic world, parents need to communicate with their kids during the school day. The kids need to have a phone. Both parents are working, and they need to be able to contact the child and let them know a third party will be picking them up or some such.
These are the things we deal with today.
That’s parenting? Who knew?
I was teaching 8th graders (13-15 yrs old) for several years, in the mid-late 90s... once cell phones were just becoming ubiquitous. Trust me, this is NOT a new trend.
At just about every 8th grade dance or event we had, the girls would grab the boys' phones or digital cameras, run to the ladies room for 90 seconds, and then run back out and return the devices to the boys. I'd tell a female teacher, they'd stand in the restroom, but the girls would still go into the stalls.
And that was one of the more tame stories from my teaching days. I collected a note every month or two referring to sex parties, open invitations for any and all boys to show up for "dogging" in the local park (and I heard a teacher from another school showed up and participated), strip poker parties with parents at home, etc etc etc. (Yes, I reported them all as required... that didn't do much. The union rep who was my assigned mentor "jokingly" suggested I blackmail the cute little HS sophomore that I caught having sex with her BF in an empty classroom... I found out the next semester that he had done so in a similar situation a decade before.)
This was in the late 90s, folks. THAT generation gave birth to THIS generation.