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I'm as baffled as you Lynn. I'm very concerned about the huge amount of time children/parents, friends/neighbors are spending connected to all these "tv screens."
The kids' reasons are understandable. It's been going on with kids for as long as I've been alive. We had our fair share of flirting, drama, and warfare. Some of it was sweet, some of it was quite vicious.
The difference is we were peers who grew up together. We had to face each other daily in the classroom, on the playground, and in the streets. We knew our friends, and we knew our enemies. We didn't have to worry so much about the interference of strangers because we didn't want to have anything to do with them - unless we really needed something from them.
At the age of 9, I was with my friends one day when some other kids rode up and said a man was sitting in his car in front of a house - and he wasn't wearing ANY pants. Why the heck would anybody do THAT? He was parked in front of a friend's house, so my best friend and I hopped on our bikes to go have a look. We stopped our bikes on the sidewalk and peered over at him. It was the funniest thing we had ever seen. When he made eye contact with us, we busted out laughing. He drove away, and we never saw him again. There would have been no way he could have gotten close to us. We knew where to run...and we had a head start because he didn't look like the type that would want to run down the street without any pants, lol. Besides, my friend and I really needed that laugh, lol.
But kids today are really playing with fire on the internet. People can be very good at imitating others. The vicious and/or outcast kids were included in my peer community. That man in the car never would have been welcome in our community - even if he WAS wearing pants. It would just be too weird to see an adult want to hang around and play children's games - unless he had a severe and obvious brain injury.
Just about everyone around the world has access to the internet these days, including prisons. These parents who desperately want to protect their children from the REAL world could possibly be exposing them to the REALLY REAL world. If they needed to go to work or out on a date, would they be comfortable having local prisoners to serve as their nanny? Even if they are very nice adults - how would the anger level of a child match up to the anger level of an imprisoned pedophile?
We learned valuable life skills growing up because we grew up together. We learned how to walk on our own two feet in our own community - our skills expanded as we expanded further out of our community. It wasn't served to us all at once as fast food - or shoved down our throats under the disguise of a "Happy Meal."
If these kids really are peers, it's still very dangerous. We considered ourselves invincible - but it would have been VERY dangerous for us kids in Chicago to take a bus to NYC, a flight to LA, or a boat to China to confront the kids over there.
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