Teen suicides: Parents, monitor your kids

Peachtree City is reeling from two teen suicides in the past two weeks. The big question is: what are we going to do about it?

The first course of action is to stop all the rumor-mongering. No good comes of it and sometimes, folks, it’s just none of your business. Mind your own lives, and especially, mind your own kids.

Granted, it’s easy for me to say that. I’m the father of a 4-year-old and a 3-month-old; they are far easier to monitor than your average teen. But I know as they grow up it will get far more challenging and I’ll have to be on my toes and then some.

Parents, maybe now more than ever, need to demand information from their teenagers. Who are they hanging out with? Who in their peer group is in trouble with the law? What information are they posting online, perhaps exposing themselves to potential predators?

Parents are well advised to check out MySpace.com. It’s a Web site where kids can blog, post messages and photos and reveal some of themselves. Very popular with the local teenage crowd, or so I hear.

I’m not saying we need to totally impinge on our youths’ free speech rights, but parents should be aware of what’s on their kid’s mind, and logging onto their blog or Web site is an excellent way to do it.

Several parents have shared concerns with me about MySpace.com in particular. Some kids are revealing too much about themselves, such as their address and other personal information. Other material posted on MySpace Web pages is slightly disturbing and inappropriate, at least in my eyes.

One local mom told me she has her girls’ various usernames and passwords so she can go behind them and track their online activity. That’s a pretty good idea, and it speaks well of her relationships with her daughters that they feel at least marginally comfortable with that arrangement.

Software can do the online spying for you, particularly if you’re not sure about how upfront they are being with you. (I can remember telling more than one big fib to my mom and dad, back in the day!).

Software monitoring plans will work, assuming that your teen is using his or her home computer to log on. More and more of the newest cellphones have Web access built in, so that might be a tougher nut to crack. Then again you pay for the cell phone service, right?

How many of you parents out there let your kids drive one of the family cars? Maybe you trust your teen enough to let them have a car of their own. If you’re at all worried about where they’re going, you can purchase a “black box” GPS unit that will track not only where they’re going but also how fast they are going.

Of course, some of the aforementioned newfangled cellphones also have GPS locators built in, so that technology also might pay off.

All these ideas to “crack down” on your kids might sound a bit too Big Brother, and maybe they are. Your mileage will vary.

By no means am I saying today’s teens can’t be trusted. There are many solid teenagers peppering our high schools who will accomplish more in the next four years of their lives than I ever will in my lifetime.

They’re smart and almost all of them have good heads on their shoulders. But just a few of them need a little help. The question is, will we as parents be making every effort to listen?

This is not to say that either of the two recent deaths of McIntosh High School students could have been prevented. Despite all the suicide hotlines and feel-good therapy sessions that are available, it may be that some kids are just wired differently from others.

At 33, I’m not too far removed from my own teen angst to recall thinking about committing suicide once or twice when I was in high school. I don’t specifically remember what I was so upset about, and I never honestly took any concrete steps toward killing myself.

One of my friends did try to commit suicide. I didn’t find out about it until years later, but he had some serious self-esteem issues and had quite a bit of inner turmoil. Fortunately, his plan didn’t work and now he has a successful career and a family of his own.

Maybe the “Big Brother” model of parenting isn’t a solution to help prevent teen suicide. Maybe it’s just a matter of our teens understanding that while gray skies can make you feel gloomy, there’s always light at the end of the tunnel, no matter your troubles.

There’s always hope, especially where there’s love. Even if it has to be tough love.