This blog and video come with a trauma warning. If you or your teen are experiencing depression and need to talk to someone, please call the National Suicide Hotline at 1-800-273-8255.
“Sometimes I feel like I want to give it up, but it’s such a big part of teenage life, I just don’t.” (Teen on Childhood 2.0 Life in the Digital Age)
Do You Know How to Help Protect Your Kids and Teens from Cyberbullying and Sextortion?
Do you feel like you can protect your kids from the dangers online?
Do you feel like your kids need to learn to navigate the digital world on their own?
After all, they live in the Information Age which surely comes with some benefits. Us Parents grew up with all of the physical dangers and there’s only so much fear we can take on.
Parents, we need to adapt and it needs to happen quickly.
The COVID pandemic has exacerbated process addictions like screen time.
Statistics show that violent crimes, physical dangers, are not as much of a risk to our children as the harms online, including cyberbullying, sextortion, digital marketing that uses highly successful and strategic neuro-marketing tactics.
An Important Documentary About Sextortion and Cyberbullying
You and your teen need to watch Childhood 2.0 The Living Experiment to really see what it’s like for our children and teens growing up in the digital age. Parents, we do hard things and it’s time to stop burying our heads in the sand when it comes to our teens and social media and the scariness of what’s out there on the internet.
If you are the kind of parent who believes “This will never happen to my son or my daughter,” you are living in an alternate reality. Process addictions like screen time addictions are real. Youth suicide rates are up and in younger children.
If you or your teen are experiencing depression and need to talk to someone, please call the National Suicide Hotline at 1-800-273-8255.
We can’t control all of the internet, but we also can’t throw our hands up in the air and not do anything and be totally helpless.
What is Self-Coaching?
When it comes to helping our teens there’s nothing us parents won’t do.
It’s just that we don’t cause and we don’t control a lot. Recognizing the reality that we can’t prevent suffering for our teens or ourselves is powerful awareness.
In this YouTube I am doing the hard work, putting in the time, to coach myself (aka being curious and creating thought awareness) on the topic of sextortion on the internet and our teens.
This is very hard work, but it’s the most important work us parents need to do for ourselves to truly help our teens.
You may have heard the tragic news of the high school student who was a victim of sextortion by internet trolls who sent a compromised photo of a girl he knew, or he thought was her, and then asked him to send a photo of himself. Once he did, he received an email asking for $300 or the photo would be spread on the internet. He sent the money and then received another email asking for $1,000 or the photo would be shared. He didn’t have the money and panicked and within six hours of receiving the first email he ended his life.
Why It’s Wrong to Think “This Can’t Happen to My Teen”
If you believe this can’t be your teen, you are wrong.
I was panicked with the worst fear possible when I heard this tragic story. Thoughts create feelings and feelings drive actions. I felt panic and froze. In other words, I froze in my steps and wasn’t doing anything to help my teens at all. With self-coaching, I was able to get curious and create thought awareness. Current thoughts create current reality and current result. If I wanted to get unstuck from freeze mode, I needed to create awareness of my thoughts that were creating the feeling of panic.
Once I created powerful awareness of my current thoughts and feelings and actions, then I can do some self-discovery to figure out why I keep choosing to stay stuck and then create some powerful thought shift to a thought that creates a feeling of intentional.
Positive Actions to Take Against Sextortion and Cyberbullying
Here’s what I found out.
The most powerful current thought coming up for me that was creating a feeling of panic and sending me into a stress response freeze mode was:
“I haven’t done enough to protect my kids.”
This thought created panic, the action of freezing and the result: “I’m not doing anything.”
Then, I created a thought shift to something that is believable to me and will create a feeling of intentional, which is how I decided I want to feel.
Here’s my new thought:
“I trust myself to show up even when it’s a hard issue, topic or conversation.”
Feeling: Intentional
Action: Self-coaching, check out documentary and resources and write opening to conversation script with my teen
Result: I’m showing up to help my teens through difficult times.
See how that self-coaching works? It’s important work and our teens are worth it. Make sure you check out imecommunity.com and Join for Dr. Karla coaching.
Self-love superpower,
Dr. Karla, ActivistMD