Dinner with the kids gets more and more interesting as they get older.  Just last night we learned the following from our oldest two, in 9th and 8th grades respectively:

• Teachers will randomly seize students’ cell phones and check them for pornographic pictures.  It has become an unfortunate practice for some kids to take nude pics of themselves with their phone-cams and send them to boyfriends, girlfriends or just friends.  Unfortunately these kids don’t stop to think about what happens if boyfriends become ex-boyfriends and decide to share that embarrassing picture with all their good buddies, or post it on MySpace, etc. (Here’s a coincidence: The Journal had an article today about this rising trend with teenagers).

  All this came up over dinner because one of our kids’ friends had received a self portrait of a topless girl. The girl had taken it and sent it to an ex-boyfriend in an effort to win him back and of course that kid forwarded it to a friend who forwarded to another friend, and so on.  Luckily our kids’ friend immediately deleted the picture so when a teacher asked to see his phone there was nothing to find.

• The sheriff’s deputies will do K-9 inspections of students’ lockers.  If a dog "hits" on a locker then school administrators will inspect 10 lockers to the left and 10 lockers to the right of the locker that was originally targeted.  According to the kids it was just 8 lockers in each direction last year, but they increased it this year. They also say that electronic devices cause the dog to hit, so students regularly have MP3 players and the like confiscated from their lockers.

Our kids really do live in a different world than the one I grew up in, and I grew up in the suburbs of DC!  We had gangs, regular fights, drugs and such, but we didn’t have K-9 dogs sniffing our lockers and we didn’t even have police on campus on a regular basis.  They showed up only if an administrator called them.  Although I do remember feeling like I had no rights and chomping at the bit to become an adult who didn’t have to put up with a lot of petty crap (never occurred to me to think about the responsibilities that came with those freedoms) I think the kids today are more put upon than we were.  I’m not necessarily saying it’s wrong, I’m just saying it’s different. Maybe it has to be this way because the consequences of age-old teenage boneheadedness are so much worse.

Take the whole cell phone thing.  We didn’t have cell phones; they were still years away and cell phones with cameras were even more distant.  If we’d had them I’m sure we would done equally stupid things with them as our kids, but in our day the worst that would happen is that you’d write some sort of explicit note and it would fall into the wrong hands.  Maybe a few people would see it an talk about it.  The idea of hundreds or thousands of people seeing nude self portraits would have been literally unfathomable, but today you make one silly mistake and literally the whole world might know about it.

One thing that does worry me is the "guilty until proven innocent" attitude that seems to prevail in the schools.  Take our kids’ friend.  What if the picture had been sent to him, without his knowledge, while he was in class.  The teacher takes the phone and finds the picture and the kid is instantly in trouble for something his friend did.  He did nothing other than have a phone that can receive pictures, yet he’d probably be disciplined for the picture being on his phone. Doesn’t seem fair.

We made sure to point out to the kids exactly why it was a horrible idea to do something like sending a naked picture of yourself to a friend.  It seems not to have occurred to them that their friends might do something inconsiderate with the picture as the result of a falling out, or even make an innocent mistake and forward it to someone else who would then blast it to the world.  Sure, we talked about the immorality of such actions, but with kids it’s usually a good idea to point out the practical implications of their behavior.  It tends to hit home much more than, "Don’t do it because it’s wrong."