This week a mum on our forum discovered her 14-year-old son had been ‘sexting’ a girl. She’d been told in confidence and could not reveal to her son that she knew. She was desperately worried that he could be charged with creating child pornography. Excerpt: “Is sexting (just sms, kik or whatever), only words, not.. Read more
Mobile bill horror, and a mother’s revenge
June 25, 2013 28 Comments
By Rachel Hynes. I’ve written before about my daughter’s tendency to blow out the capped mobile plan: Happy birthday SMS, hope you enjoyed your gift. Well, it’s happened again. This time it’s the new breed of Internet radio to blame. And my teenager of course. This month, Ms 15 racked up $550 in data charges.. Read more
Social media does not make you a horrible person
June 21, 2013 8 Comments
From your comments on our post Are our kids the me, me, me generation? it’s clear that people feel strongly about the role of social media in our world. Some of you believe adults are just as guilty of living their lives bent over an iPhone; others feel we are entitled to spend our down.. Read more
Internet fail – how I let my teenager down
February 26, 2013 24 Comments
By Rachel Hynes. I can’t shake the feeling that I may have let my teenager down when it came to how we handled the Internet in our house. In 1998, the year my daughter was born, it really was a new frontier. Australia was one of a handful of countries with a significant number of.. Read more
Mum’s iPhone for teenager – too many strings attached?
January 5, 2013 15 Comments
By now, many of you will have read the article doing the rounds about the American mom who gave her 13-year-old an iPhone for Christmas, with an 18-point contract. Janelle Burley Griffin posted her letter to her son on her personal blog on Christmas Day, but it has gone viral since it was republished at.. Read more
Happy birthday SMS, hope you enjoyed your gift
December 4, 2012 Leave a Comment
By Rachel Hynes. SMS, or text messaging, turned 20 this week. And this is how I felt about it. It’s true, I went through the bills and added it up. The mobile calls were ten times worse. Thank god for capped plans. She only went over by about $500 this year. We had a bad.. Read more
‘Sexting’ teens: decriminalising young people’s sexual practices
October 2, 2012 2 Comments
By Danielle Tyson, Monash University; Amy Shields Dobson, Monash University, and Mary Lou Rasmussen, Monash University. Cases of teenagers “sexting” each other have recently provoked panicked responses by media, parents, educators and policy makers in Australia. Now a Victorian parliamentary inquiry into the practice has been told it’s better to use discretionary powers to deal.. Read more
4 steps to take if your teenager is being cyber-bullied
August 16, 2012 Leave a Comment
Cyber-bullying is an ongoing issue for young Australians, with 1 in 4 children from year 4 to year 9 reporting that they have been bullied online [1]. Parentline defines bullying as the deliberate psychological, emotional and/or physical harassment of one person by another person or group. It can include exclusion from peer groups, intimidation, extortion,.. Read more
Who’s ‘sexting’ who?
December 8, 2011 Leave a Comment
Despite parental concerns and media hype, a new study is claiming that the practice of ‘sexting’ is not particularly common amongst teenagers. The University of New Hampshire found that about 1% of surveyed teens had participated in ‘sexting’ – sending sexually explicit images via mobile phone or internet – in the past year. Researchers surveyed.. Read more
