I know all parents give endless advice, and I couldn’t tell you a tenth of the advice that my parents gave me. I do however remember something they told me and I will be giving the same advice to my children. My parents have both passed. They passed before I was 30, so I’m sure that I look at these memories of things my parents said to me a little differently. I also will never get the experience of getting advice from them again, so I’m sure that this advice may seem a little juvenile to someone who got to become a “real” adult with their parents.
“Don’t do anything that you don’t want printed on the front page of the paper.” My Parents
This was the way that my parents encouraged me to behave as a teenager. I grew up in a small rural, country town. The population is in the low 2k range. I don’t know if you have ever lived in a small town, but let me tell you one thing about it. Everybody knows everything about everybody. That is no exaggeration. And this little rural area had a small newspaper that covered a few of the small towns in the area. Everything or it seemed like everything made it’s way into the paper. This is because there isn’t a whole lot of actual news, even when you combined the “news” of a few small towns. It’s also because small towns love to gossip.
So it was literal that anything that you did could be printed in the paper, and then even if everyone didn’t know it in the moment, they surely would when the papers went out. This really took away the air of secrecy of living a life of anonymity growing up with this normal practice. I have never experienced this in any big city I lived in, only small towns.
This is something that may not translate well with my own children because that little old paper doesn’t exist anymore. The world is so much larger now. We have access to new from all over the world and literally beyond. We can check the weather on Mars (the high today is 20°F and the low is -135°F, just so you know!)
I will still tell them not to do anything that they don’t want on the front page of the paper. I will further explain to them that it means if you don’t want me, your dad, or others, to find out what you’re doing, then you shouldn’t be doing it. You shouldn’t be sneaking out because I could and probably would find out. And the punishment would definitely be worse if I found out about it from social media. We live in a world where everything you do is subject to being posted about and then scrutinized. The internet is forever. And every stupid thing they do could be posted, even without their permission. This reality could effect their future. This could effect their future jobs and lives.
This is the world my kids are growing up in. As a parent this is honestly a love/hate topic for me. I love that the memories I post about will always be there to bring me joy. And right now my children are too small to have their own social media accounts. They can’t post silly things to the internet and neither can their friends. That’s a thing I don’t have to worry about, but I realize that’s something that is coming. It’s something I fear but must embrace. So, I will be giving my children the advice my parents gave me. “Don’t do anything you don’t want printed on the front page of the paper.”
Stay safe, stay rad, and wash your DANG hands!
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