Parents, our children are going viral and it's not always good
If I Google my name, I get tons of journalism kind of things. There are blog posts, pictures, social media profiles, and even other people with the same name.
One of those people is an officer who was killed in Los Angeles a few years back. I always get sad when I see his photo.
If I click on Google's suggested search from my name, labeled "louie villalobos arizona," I get a few more suggestions. Included in that is my Rate My Professor page where one of my former journalism students says she saw me spit on a child.
Keep clicking through those results and there is a 2004 link to a post that featured a photo blog I was running at the time. I was a border reporter in Yuma and using my camera phone to post images from the region. I would like to point out that I was doing a camera-phone blog more than 10 years ago.
But I digress. What you won't see on Google or any other internet profile or page, though, are my childhood mistakes.
That means those mistakes won't haunt me for the foreseeable future. It means I won't lose job opportunities or potential scholarships. I won't have the world come down on me to collectively point a judgmental finger.
I won't be labeled a racist or dismissed as stupid by the court of social media justice. Now, some of that might still happen to me. But it will be as an adult and because I'm, well, me now.
Too bad our kids don't have that same luxury. Every day we have kids trending across social media for doing the stupidest things in the world. They do and post racist things. They offend and they poorly represent themselves and their families.
Then we descend and proceed to make them pay dearly and move on to the next moment of rage. This has especially been true in Arizona lately.
So I'll ask parents to talk to their kids early and often about the benefits and perils of social media. That instant gratification of an Instagram like or Snapchat attention can lead to long-term problems.
What kids don’t always understand is that words and actions carry weight. What most of us don’t get yet is that the internet is increasingly becoming the place where the punishment is carried out — and carried out swiftly.
Families can use social media and the internet to do great and rewarding things. Kids can gain a great deal of confidence and knowledge via social media. But part of that has to be us talking to them about long-term consequences and us realizing that the world is a smaller place than it was when we were doing stupid stuff. The new reality is that one bad post can bring it all crashing down.
Also, obviously, let’s talk to our kids about not being racist, hateful and mean-spirited. Combine the two talks and you can hopefully have a child get through those awkward years with search results free and clear of public shaming AND stupid mistakes.