填空题
A. Especially since sexting (sex and texting)
might actually be the least of oar worries. Compared with what they are actually
doing, teenagers' virtual sex lives may be less a mirror than an illusion, an
image of how they see themselves that vanishes as you get up close. The research
suggests that even as they get more electronically immodest, they are delaying
actual sex, having fewer partners and generally behaving more responsibly than
many of their parents did. By all means, come down hard on the kid who uses a
phone to cheat or bully or harass or cause harm. But when it comes to baring
all, remind them that even if they escape the law they'll never erase the
trail.
B. Just don't imagine that you can prevail by brute force. You can block websites, limit time online, screen e-mail, remove the webcam. But kids are more nimble than wise; they will fend a workaround. And we are fighting on their territory. They are up in the trees and underground and in caves while we march around in our bright red uniforms trying to defend their dignity and virtue. Not a fair fight.
C. Unfortunately it's too late to legislate that no one should be 'allowed a cell phone until he or she is at least 18 and fully licensed to use it. Cell phones took us by surprise: so small, so innocent, so powerful in the hands of a bored or twisted teen who now has an extremely efficient tool for wasting time, cheating on tests, bullying classmates, arranging drug deals and, more commonly, flirting (to make playfully romantic or sexual overtures) in a junior-varsity version of Girls Gone Wild.
D. How many parents insisted after Columbine and Sept. 11 that their children be reachable at all times? How comforting to give kids cell phones, so that urgent reassurances were never more than 10 digits away. And how handy, as we juggled jobs and meetings and soccer matches, to be able to rearrange deployments on the fly. Their phones served our needs so well; too bad we didn't factor in adolescent creativity.
E. The rush of prosecutions, however, just reminds us that the law makes an awful parent. A legal system naturally depends on deterrence; you make an example of those you manage to catch, so that potential offenders think twice. But to many a teen, danger is as likely to feed desire as to frustrate it. The qualities required to shape their behavior, the humor and patience mixed just a certain way with clarity and resolve, are too much to expect from laws written to apply equally to everyone. Don't we need to exempt them from prosecution for being idiots and to find some better way to punish conduct that we didn't manage to prevent?
F. But there's nothing quite like the image of your child on a registry of sex offenders to concentrate the parental mind. It now has a catchy new label, but "sexting" has been around, as a trick and a problem, for years: in 2004 a 15-year-old Pittsburgh girl was charged with sexual abuse of children and dissemination of child pornography when she posted nude pictures of herself online. And just in the past year, more than a dozen states have followed suit, arresting kids as young as 13 for sending or receiving smutty pictures on their phones. For parents, these cases have suddenly raised the prospect of retirement savings melted down to pay legal bills, college dreams deferred, scholarships lost.
G. Is this the dark side of the parental imagination? Yes. But a study released last December found that one in five teens had sent or posted a naked picture of themselves, and a third had received such a picture or video by text message or e-mail. Three out of four teens say posting suggestive stnff"can have serious negative consequences," which means they know it's dumb-and they do it anyway.
B. Just don't imagine that you can prevail by brute force. You can block websites, limit time online, screen e-mail, remove the webcam. But kids are more nimble than wise; they will fend a workaround. And we are fighting on their territory. They are up in the trees and underground and in caves while we march around in our bright red uniforms trying to defend their dignity and virtue. Not a fair fight.
C. Unfortunately it's too late to legislate that no one should be 'allowed a cell phone until he or she is at least 18 and fully licensed to use it. Cell phones took us by surprise: so small, so innocent, so powerful in the hands of a bored or twisted teen who now has an extremely efficient tool for wasting time, cheating on tests, bullying classmates, arranging drug deals and, more commonly, flirting (to make playfully romantic or sexual overtures) in a junior-varsity version of Girls Gone Wild.
D. How many parents insisted after Columbine and Sept. 11 that their children be reachable at all times? How comforting to give kids cell phones, so that urgent reassurances were never more than 10 digits away. And how handy, as we juggled jobs and meetings and soccer matches, to be able to rearrange deployments on the fly. Their phones served our needs so well; too bad we didn't factor in adolescent creativity.
E. The rush of prosecutions, however, just reminds us that the law makes an awful parent. A legal system naturally depends on deterrence; you make an example of those you manage to catch, so that potential offenders think twice. But to many a teen, danger is as likely to feed desire as to frustrate it. The qualities required to shape their behavior, the humor and patience mixed just a certain way with clarity and resolve, are too much to expect from laws written to apply equally to everyone. Don't we need to exempt them from prosecution for being idiots and to find some better way to punish conduct that we didn't manage to prevent?
F. But there's nothing quite like the image of your child on a registry of sex offenders to concentrate the parental mind. It now has a catchy new label, but "sexting" has been around, as a trick and a problem, for years: in 2004 a 15-year-old Pittsburgh girl was charged with sexual abuse of children and dissemination of child pornography when she posted nude pictures of herself online. And just in the past year, more than a dozen states have followed suit, arresting kids as young as 13 for sending or receiving smutty pictures on their phones. For parents, these cases have suddenly raised the prospect of retirement savings melted down to pay legal bills, college dreams deferred, scholarships lost.
G. Is this the dark side of the parental imagination? Yes. But a study released last December found that one in five teens had sent or posted a naked picture of themselves, and a third had received such a picture or video by text message or e-mail. Three out of four teens say posting suggestive stnff"can have serious negative consequences," which means they know it's dumb-and they do it anyway.