Saying goodbye, teenagers, and thinking through one's blogging

Last night, we had our "farewell dinner" for those seniors who will be graduating from high school this year and leaving our All Saints Pasadena youth group.  We had fourteen seniors present, and several more who were unable to attend due to other commitments.  (Is it just me, or is being 17 and 18 a heck of a lot busier now than it was twenty or thirty years ago?)

One by one, kids got up to share anecdotes and offer praise to each of our seniors.  There was lots of silliness, hugs, kisses, and a tear or two.  Honestly, it was hard for me.   When I first started volunteering at All Saints, the youth in the class of 2005 were finishing up seventh grade.  I've watched these kids grow, literally and figuratively, into young men and women who make me so proud.  I've watched them make mistakes, and learn from them; I've watched them repeat the same mistakes and fail to learn.  I've watched their triumphs and rejoiced with them; I've seen their failures and their heartbreaks, and I've been lucky enough to have been by their side through some of these.  I've been to their school recitals; I've been to soccer games and track meets -- and I've been to the hospital a time or two as well.  I've bandaged their cuts, listened to their romantic highs and lows, and ooohed and aaahed appropriately over so many prom pictures, I can't even count.

I'm 38, and not yet a father to kids of my own.  So many guys my age have their own kids, but that hasn't happened for me -- yet.  I always expected that I would be a father at a much younger age than I am now.  If you had asked me twenty years ago what I expected by the time I was 38, I would have assured you that I would have three kids, with the oldest perhaps in junior high school.  I've always been clear on the concept that I liked children and young adults.  And yet, for any number of reasons (some obvious to my readers, some not) kids have not happened for me yet.  My fiancee and I have high hopes of starting a family someday, but for now, I am childless (save, of course, for the much-loved, much discussed, oft-kissed and oft-photographed Matilde!)

So my All Saints youth group kids are "my kids".  They are certainly young enough; the most senior among them were born when I was 19.  Just within the last few years, I've started to feel less and less like a loving older brother and more and more like a father figure.  (So far, all of the Dads of my youth group kids  at All Saints are older than I am, but given our particular demographic, that makes sense.)  I'm very, very attached to them, and I feel genuine sadness as I watch them grow up and move away.   (Most are moving away; we've got kids going off to places as diverse as Berkeley, Willamette, Bryn Mawr, and SUNY Purchase.  Though I'll miss 'em, I stand by what I wrote Tuesday.)

I hope when these kids are a little older, they'll choose to work with teens themselves.  I hope that somewhere, perhaps (one hopes) in an Episcopal parish, they will give their time and energy to creating a safe space for other youth.  I hope they will remember how loved and appreciated and praised they were at All Saints; I hope that they will be eager to pass that on to a future generation.  My great dream is, of course, to continue to volunteer at All Saints until I surrender my position to some younger guy or gal who was once one of "my kids."  That would be very, very sweet.

Now, on a related subject:  teenagers and their blogs.  Most of my teenagers blog.  Many have "Myspace" or "Xanga" or "Livejournal" or "Journalspace"; few use Typepad (that seems to be for us older folk.)  Most of them eagerly proffer links to their blogs to one and all, and I do read them (when invited to do so, mind you.)  Sometimes what I read makes me wince.  Many of the high schoolers talk openly, boastfully, of sex and drugs.  Others share painful, personal details of their lives.  In some instances, I've made a decision not to read someone's blog because I felt strongly that I only wanted to know that information about them if they shared it with me directly, not by reading their journals.

On the one hand, I'm so glad that they have the technology to stay in touch with each other and share their thoughts, feelings, funny stories, and photos.  On the other hand, I worry so much about the consequences of so little self-censorship!  Once posted, things have a way of surviving forever in cyberspace, and simply deleting a post may not eradicate it forever.  With their willingness to disclose so much which an older generation kept private, these kids are erasing the barrier between the public and the personal in a way that may not serve them well.  By documenting so many details of their intimate lives, many are losing the opportunity to start over, to change, to redefine themselves in the eyes of their peers, parents, and everyone else.  Their desire to have others read about and respond to their lives seems to trump the need to keep certain things personal and private and protected.

As anyone who reads this blog can tell, I leave a lot out.  I remember that a great many people, only some of whom I know, are reading.  I remember that every word and every image becomes public.  I owe it to myself, to my family, and to those in my circle to be judicious about what goes up here and what remains hidden.  If I could give one piece of advice to my kids at both the college and the high school levels, it would indeed be to be very, very careful about what you all share.  If you don't want your parents, teachers, and future spouses to see it, don't put it up.   Please.

Let me recommend a great post on this subject by someone much younger than myself, Corianne of Glamour Girl.  She's right on the money.

Comments

[Braidwood]

If you click on the link to my site, you can see my anonymous blog. It actually has turned out to be more self-revealing than I intended and I've told friends and family about it, hoping they would drop by. It is interesting to notice the pull to share, and the pull to keep things to myself. I tend to the private side.

[Steve]

Your point about stuff being archived online is a salient one - thanks to The Way Back Machine - http://www.archive.org/ - you can look at old versions of websites, even if they've been deleted long ago. I'm embarrassed enough by the huge design faux pas I made on the early incarnations of my website - God forbid I'd started blogging my inmost thoughts before I realised I couldn't get rid of it and my perspective would change!

On a geek-note, there may be some kind of HTML header you can add to a page to stop it from being archived, in the way that you can block search engines from archiving your page... Anyone?

[Caitriona]

Did a search. Seems the Way Back Machine doesn't have my old websites archived. What a shame. I had some good recipes on my geocities site.

[Jeff]

By documenting so many details of their intimate lives, many are losing the opportunity to start over, to change, to redefine themselves in the eyes of their peers, parents, and everyone else.

I don't think blogging keeps anyone from being able to redefine themselves. If anything, it makes it easier.

I've been blogging off and on (mostly off, these days) since 1999 or so. I'm certainly not the person I was six years ago; looking back at some of those entries makes me wince. But I've never felt constrained to keep myself consistent with something I uploaded six years ago, and I think people can recognize

When I went off to school, I was looking to "start over" - I went across the country to escape what I saw as the "Southern California mentality" and to attend school with people who hadn't formed their opinions of me in kindergarten. However, I don't think that being able to make a fresh start would have been prevented if I had known what blogging was back in 1995. Rather, the need would have been lessened because I would have had another outlet to challenge what people thought of me.

Their desire to have others read about and respond to their lives seems to trump the need to keep certain things personal and private and protected.

This, I suspect, is the more common point of concern, and it comes across as half paternalism and half culture clash. We look at these people as children who need to be protected (cf. all the scare sites about "online predators"), and recognize the need to keep information private, but we don't acknowledge the benefits of teenagers being able to express themselves. (It's similar, I think, to adults' attitudes about teenage sexuality; we acknowledge the potential risks but not the potential benefits, because the latter are too personal to observe.)

I think it's also a culture clash, because having this avenue for expression changes our ideas about privacy. There's a lot of talk about the "need to keep things personal and private and protected," but little talk about why.

[Hugo]

Jeff, the "why" here isn't that complicated: not all teenagers recognize what the long-term consequences of making their private behavior public will be. I'm all for teenagers expressing their feelings, hopes, beliefs, etc. But from what I've seen, they're expressing much more than that, often providing intimate details of their sexual/chemical lives that could have real consequences down the road. Sometimes

[Caitriona]

Looks like you didn't finish what you were saying, Hugo.

In th interest of giving kids a place to voice their feelings, hopes, and beliefs, I have implemented Yahoo!Groups sites for my exchange students, host-families, host-siblings, and staff.

[Emily H.]

I have seen awful, awful livejournal behavior among college students--including a secondhand report of an attempted suicide resulting from some bitchy livejournal posts. Honestly, I'm not so much worried about the long-term consequences of putting your bad life choices on the internet as I am worried about the meanness and drama and flaming.

I think the only thing that would get some people to stop being way too mean and self-revelatory is a shift in LiveJournal culture so that these things aren't accepted as normal; and that won't happen as long as the demographics of LiveJournal are as young as they are.

(LJ's features--friends lists, friend locking, filters, threaded commenting--don't help. My worst online behavior* has been abetted by LJ).

*Not that it's all that bad. I have Very Strict Rules after all the angst I've seen.

[cmc]

I foresee at least one political scandal in say 20-25 years when our current young adult bloggers start running for political office and the press digs up their old blogs.

[yami]

Steve: you can remove your site from the Wayback Machine by adding a note to your robots.txt file. Not sure if there's a way for those with hosted blogs at Typepad, etc., to do this, as many such hosts don't allow you to upload extra files.