My daughter convinced me that I would love the show “This is Us,” so I binge-watched the first two seasons over a week of evenings. And she was right: I love it. I think the thing I most appreciate is the fact that fault is not easily assigned. The show follows triplets and their parents, showing the adult kids now alongside incidents from their childhood that influenced that behavior. I like that blame is not placed squarely on the shoulders of the parents.

      The kids of that show did not grow up in a tech-heavy society like our kids are. The increase in technology has tripled the number of influences on our children. YouTube bloggers are selling themselves as “just like us.” But they are not just like us. They are making tons of money off of us watching them, all the while showing us all the new things they’ve bought with that money.  Our kids are looking at this and questioning why, if they’re just “like me,” don’t I have all this stuff?

    This month I’m conducting conferences with all of the families in our school.  The easiest conferences in the secondary are the ones in which the student has a goal for college and a profession.  These kids recognize that school and teachers can help them get there, and they focus their energy on that goal.  My heart breaks in the conferences of students just “doing” school.  The conference is spent trying to figure out the fault… the cause.    There are literally a hundred possible causes!  A new one has come to my attention this week, and I’m really struggling with what to do.  I’m finding that some of my middle schoolers are perfectly happy to live life vicariously through the internet.  I cannot wrap my head around that, but I am going to keep seeking answers.  

     My advice to you as parents is to be very aware of what your children are watching.  We’ve done so much to help our children avoid unsuitable sites, but the sites stealing our children’s drive are as innocuous as watching a video game being played by a YouTube gamer all the way to the end.  I doubt we’ll ever be able to assign any fault to the internet specifically for this, but I do think we need to be aware and vigilant.

-       Michelle