Parental Controls Are Failing Our Children

In this fast paced society of the 22^nd Century, there is an alarming trend developing whereby children and teenagers seem to have no faith in confiding in their parents. Instead, there are chat rooms available to act as interim guides for everything teenagers suffer-from acne, molestation, sexual abuse, physical abuse, first aid, mental health care and so forth.

While I readily volunteer my services online to help troubled kids and adults find help, I find it distressing to realize these kids seem to have no one to talk to except their peer group, and then their friends minimize real problems so that ridicule and smart aleck comments run amok without the needed contributors who can offer solid facts to help these victims of parental neglect.

While most chat rooms discuss idle gossip and fashion trends, some sites have had to broaden their categories so as to offer guidance from professional health care workers, paramedics, doctors and other types of crisis line support so that these kids will recognize when their problems require intervention.

Where are the parents of these teenagers? Why don't these kids feel the trust and confidence in confiding in them about festering wounds? What happened to make the parents appear seemingly invisible in our society?

The fact that these kids, some under treatment for mental illness, seem to have no outside influence with any common sense, and it has become alarming in the extreme. Should it not be downright scary that a teen would turn to a chat room for guidance on how to avoid a mother's caressing hands from touching the private parts of their child's body?

With all of the crisis lines available, plus their computers, how is it possible that these teens have no one to trust except for the kindness of strangers?

Reading some of these tales of horror, often related as a running joke between friends, boggle the mind. How can one turn a blind eye to cries for help or minimize the importance of any teen's problems? Kids planning to commit suicide, self-mutilators, problems in relationships that are clearly headed in a downward spiral---these are the types of questions I answer every day.

Children of the "Me Generation" are suffering untold harm from parents who fail to understand the need to parent, rather than befriend, their own children. Because of this trend, it seems logical that these websites should have built in codes to alert authorities so that these children can be removed from homes that degrade and abuse children.

Even in the workplace, I have heard tales of women with "friends" who have newborn babies and refuse to mother their children. Most of them are children, already. They refuse to hold their babies, feed them or change their diapers-leaving grandparents in a very awkward position of mothering their grandchildren while ignoring the facts, as if in belief the problem could be resolved by doing nothing. Even though they see the abuse with their own eyes, they fail to act to report the abuse, as if it is none of their business.

What has happened to the conscience of America and the world? If you were the victim of abuse, wouldn't you want to be rescued?

Whose business is it if not the person who witnesses or hears of such crimes?