What’s in a Meme?
It seems that every time something gets popular, someone finds a way to turn it into a dangerous internet meme. The movie Birdbox on Netflix stars Sandra Bullock and features her adventure with two children through a dystopian wasteland five years after a mysterious force caused mass suicide all over the world. Because this force causes you to kill yourself when you look at it most of the main characters spend the entire movie wearing blindfolds. Enter said internet meme.
The Birdbox Challenge is a video meme that asks its participants to do mundane, regular tasks while blindfolded. People have done things like cooking, walking through their home, spend 24 hours blindfolded, and even driving while blindfolded. Some of the earliest challenge videos received millions of views in a matter of days. Obviously content creators felt the need to outdo themselves and others. This led to some dumb and even dangerous stunts that eventually led to a warning from Netflix and the banning of all BirdBox challenge videos from YouTube.
People have filmed themselves walking through traffic and driving while blindfolded leading to a couple of car crashes including one by a teen in Layton, Utah. These challenges can be dangerous and unfortunately the popularity travels so fast that our kids are the first ones to learn of them and try them themselves. Always looking for something of theirs to go viral, our kids will try to copy and even outdo the other videos they’ve seen online. The TidePod challenge is another example of escalation causing a silly meme to get out of hand and even hurt people. The Tide Pod challenge was also banned by YouTube and Tide even did a series of commercials to discourage people from participating.
The Decline of Personal Responsibility
Whenever anyone, especially our kids, gets harmed by something as ridiculous as a challenge on the internet there is an outcry for someone to take responsibility. We may speak out against law enforcement for not cracking down or the production company for making the show the memes are based on. Maybe we’ll want the streaming platform or social media service that these memes are being shared on to take responsibility. Wherever we place the blame, we are understandably longing for someone to answer for these stupid and dangerous occurrences.
Gaming, social media, entertainment, and education have all come under fire from time to time for the influence they have over our kids. Learning about dangerous challenges can happen naturally from friends but the ability for information to spread over the internet is unprecedented until now. The inspiration for some of these challenges come from the media our kids consume. There are so many factors, though, that cause the spread of all this craziness but the one factor that is constant is the lack of moderation and responsibility.
As parents, we should see these occurrences as warnings that it is time for us to be more involved in what our kids are doing, whether online or offline. We have no excuse since there is so much hardware and software available to help us monitor what is happening on our kids’ screens. We are hearing all of the time that we need to be involved and that we should take responsibility for the things our children are seeing. It also falls to us to teach our kids to take personal responsibility for their actions.
Teaching Responsibility
When our kids see Netflix putting out warnings or YouTube banning content, they see a major corporation taking responsibility for their user-base’s stupid choices. In reality, though, these companies aren’t taking responsibility, they are covering their own back sides before something truly horrible and reputation ruining happens on their service or platform. We live in a world that wants to skirt around responsibility and find someone else to blame. Our kids aren’t going to learn how to take the fall for their own actions unless we teach them to do so. Here are some ways my wife and I teach that to our children:
1. They must ask forgiveness and they must give forgiveness.
We don’t just let our kids say they’re sorry. When they hurt each other’s feelings they must ask to be forgiven and then we expect the other child to say more than “It’s ok.” we want them to say “I forgive you.” This causes the offender to understand that their actions caused someone harm and the offended to realize that they have a responsibility to honor the request for forgiveness.
2. They have chores.
Our children have responsibility for things they do around the house and they don’t get paid for it. We consider keeping your room clean and your laundry in the hamper a basic requirement for living in our home. They have other chores that they cycle through and they don’t get to bargain or trade, no matter which ones they dislike or like they have to do what the chart says for that day. This way they’re learning to do junk they don’t enjoy just because they are required to do it. They don’t get paid for this either unless you consider that fact that they have to have it done to even ask to get screen time.
3. They buy their own stuff.
Our oldest two children have made some money through performing and sometimes they all get a chance to do odd jobs for friends and family to earn some cash. When they have money, they like to spend it and when it’s gone, it’s gone. We don’t usually agree to fit the bill on stuff they want. They can wait for birthdays or Christmas or they can buy it themselves. That’s how life works.
4. They are told no a lot.
We have learned the power of saying no to your children. As our oldest two have grown up they’ve heard no so much that they know when to not even ask. Sometimes I’ll have what I call a “Yes day!” this is a day when I say yes to pretty much anything they ask me (within reason.) I don’t tell them it’s a yes day but they tend to figure it out pretty quick and we all really enjoy doing things together that I would normally say no to without thinking. (Think playing four hours of Risk with your 11 and 9 year old.)
These things aren’t world changing but they can be life changing and can go a long way to help you instill a sense of responsibility in your kids. Making them take responsibility for how they feel and how they make others feel is something that I believe is truly lacking in our society and our kids have a head start at becoming excellent human beings from that step alone. Learning how to work for and spend money wisely teaches them that they are responsible for how they spend their time as well as what they earn and what they have. Finally, hearing no is critical for kids from a very young age. Life isn’t fair. There are things in life that just happen when you don’t want them to or things that you wish would happen to you that happen for others instead. This. Is. Life. Get used to it.