The Dark Side of online Role-Playing

[Carex]

@Lotherio said in The Dark Side of online Role-Playing:

You're advocating parents shouldn't stop kids from learning what a vagina is for on-line and need to stay out of their kid's business cause, furry muck is the bastion of developmental education online?

Yes. I am arguing that teenagers going to places where sex is a theme to learn about sex is not inherently evil.
Generations before us have done this, generations after us will do it too.
We shared playboys and VHS tapes. They have Anime forums and Tick-Tock (Or whatever kids are using these days)
Young people exploring their sexuality is not the end of the world.
It is not something parents should try to put an end to.
Instead, parents should be open with their kids so when the kid has questions they will come to the parent.

Teaching young people that everywhere that there is any form of sexual idea is dangerous just teaches children to be afraid of everything. I have seen this happen IRL. My mother was a total control freak when it came to my sister. She made her wear tacky culottes shorts under her skirt and taught her to never be alone with a male adult, she wasn't allowed to go to the mall or anywhere in public without other girls or my mother with her and my mother wasn't the only one like this. Lots of parents did this to their daughters and those daughters grew up to be neurotic, paranoid, nutcases because they had been conditioned to be afraid of everything.

As a boy, I was allowed to run all over the place, play with whomever I wanted to, go hiking in the woods, exploring caves, break into old abandoned houses, whatever I wanted and no one batted an eyelash and you know what? None of us ever died or got kidnapped or had anything bad happens to us just because we were outside in the world.

Teaching kids to be afraid of everyone, all the time, is damaging those kids.
Those worst-case scenarios are exceedingly rare, but if you make your child afraid of the world, you will 100% fuck them up for the rest of their lives.

That's my argument. Parents should be there for their children but let children develop at their own pace because the worst thing that can happen probably won't happen, but if you act like it will you're probably doing almost as much harm.

[Quinn]

[Meg]

because nothing bad happened to me, definitely nothing bad ever happened because of this style of parenting, and it's definitely the right one.

ok boomer.

[Lotherio]

@Carex said in The Dark Side of online Role-Playing:

None of us ever died or got kidnapped or had anything bad happens to us just because we were outside in the world.

Speak out of your own ignorance. We entered a falstaff brewery, my friend fell off a metal later and landed on a pipe. The rest of us watched as his sucking chest wound made fucked up noises and we waited for him to be airlifted out of that abandoned building. Shut the fuck up in your ignorance, your experience isn't the same for everyone else.

[Carex]

@Meg said in The Dark Side of online Role-Playing:

because nothing bad happened to me, definitely nothing bad ever happened because of this style of parenting, and it's definitely the right one.

That's not what I'm saying and you know it. I'm saying it's very, very, unlikely that the terrible things you are afraid of will actually happen but if you teach your children to be hyper-vigilant and afraid of everything, that IS something bad happening to them.

If you want to see what teaching your children to be afraid of the world does to people, go to a gun show some time.

[Kanye Qwest]

random straw men arguments are exasperating and get points deducted in debates

[Ganymede]

@Carex said in The Dark Side of online Role-Playing:

As a boy, I was allowed to run all over the place, play with whomever I wanted to, go hiking in the woods, exploring caves, break into old abandoned houses, whatever I wanted and no one batted an eyelash and you know what? None of us ever died or got kidnapped or had anything bad happens to us just because we were outside in the world.

You are familiar with the concept of privilege, I presume.

Parents should be there for their children but let children develop at their own pace because the worst thing that can happen probably won't happen, but if you act like it will you're probably doing almost as much harm.

And what about children who are mentally or emotionally less-developed? Is it wise to let them wander freely in a world which expects them to be different than they are?

Parents live in a world wholly different from people who have not had the same responsibility thrust upon them by an uncaring society that finds it permissible to disseminate the most ignorant advice as sagely. I'd rather this conversation of past traumas and philosophical hypotheses die a sudden death.

[bored]

@Auspice said in The Dark Side of online Role-Playing:

15-year-old RPing vampire sex with another 15-year old: OK
15-year-old RPing vampire sex with a 45-year-old: Not OK

Which, realistically reduces to '15 year-old RPing vampire sex: not OK' because you're never going to know. So many people here who've been MUing since the early WoD days were lying back then, myself included. I have no idea how many were obvious as minors or who could pass as adults. I had adult women hit on me OOC. Maybe some of them were secretly dudes and murders, too, I can't really know. I also had a situation where I, pretending to be an adult, was TSing with someone else, also pretending to be an adult, and in reality we were the same age and went to high school together. Accidentally harmless (and hilarious), but could have been bad for either of us, right?

I don't know how parents can really contend with any of this stuff safely. It would be great if you could encourage your children to participate only in age-appropriate explorations but do those even exist? Even age-appropriate online games are full of this (I've seen someone being groomed in an MMO guild). And society isn't actually comfortable enough with adolescent sexuality to intentionally create vetted forums to intentionally promote kids doing this. I think all you can really do is accept that your kids will lie (as all of us did) but do your best to be aware of what they're doing anyway.

[Kodiak]

@Kanye-Qwest said in The Dark Side of online Role-Playing:

@Carex said in The Dark Side of online Role-Playing:

@mietze said in The Dark Side of online Role-Playing:

I am going to be making a locked thread in the hogpit (for now) to move the personal attack posts

Feel free to just delete them. I was just trying to explain why I didn't just agree with what, on its surface, seems like a perfectly innocuous post.

I was trying to illustrate that maybe agreeing without putting any deeper thought into it was unwise.

Kinda like this: https://youtu.be/fYOA8gXpios

honestly how dare you drag Some More News into this. Those vids are mostly full of thoughtful and researched content, and failing that - funny. You are 0 for 3, sport.

I was literally in the process of typing 'How dare you drag Cody into this'

[Lisse24]

@Carex said in The Dark Side of online Role-Playing:

I'm not talking about your paranoid, nightmare scenario. I'm talking about what really happens on a real day-to-day basis where kids go online to things like Furry MUCKs and or Anime games and someone teaches them what the vagina is for.

I'm talking about the parents that try and stop that.

Parents should try and stop that!! A kid should not learn about sex and sexuality from some rando on the internet. That is NOT OK. That is setting themselves up for an abusive situation.

And if you are online and starting up a TS scene and all of a sudden you realize the person you're RPing with is so sexually immature they don't have the basic anatomy down, the correct thing to do is to stop. Advise them to talk about their issues with their parents or other trusted adult. Then let staff know there's a minor on the game.

Exploring sex is not wrong. But adults have a responsibility to all the young people around them to make sure that they are not exploring their sexuality in a way that is inherently dangerous.

[tek]

@Lisse24 Given the fact that this creep posted a sexually suggestive image of a child in the "random funny" thread, we know where they are coming from.

[bear_necessities]

@tek said in The Dark Side of online Role-Playing:

@Lisse24 Given the fact that this creep posted a sexually suggestive image of a child in the "random funny" thread, we know where they are coming from.

I thought you were exaggerating and then I went to look and wow.

Wow.

Why isn't this creep banned?

[tek]

@bear_necessities I've reported their pedo-ass posts, so we'll see.

[Kodiak]

@Carex After reading this thread, I sure am glad there isn't enough racism and sexism at Arx for you.

[tek]

@Kodiak Is this something they've whined about?

[Meg]

@tek yes.

eta: also adding, holy shit. that post. there are not mixed messages there. that's a literal child, my dude.

[mietze]

Putting in boundaries around internet use and meetups (regardless of where the people are from), as well as expecting behavior standards of one's adolescent children is not to protect their innocence, it is part of helping them gain the skills needed to become functional adults. At least it is for me.

You MUST have these conversations with your kids, IMO, if you do not want to be negligent. Maybe the parents of people 30-50 currently could claim some degree of ignorance but I do not think anyone with little kids NOW can.

You can have comprehensive sexuality education (it starts at home but I also highly recommend the Our Whole Lives/OWL sexuality education that is usually put on by UU or UCC churches, it's a developmentally appropriate curriculum that starts in groups for K/1, again in late elementary school, again in jr high, again in HS and theres adult discussion groups as well), be committed to being open and affirming and /still/ have rules.

For our family (no kind of special issues for us as far as being on the spectrum or severe mental illness) that has meant an unfolding process of release of responsibility from parent to the child throughout their childhood and adolescence. On the outside it probably looks to tiger moms and helicopter dads like we are on the permissive end (my teens do not have curfews, they are allowed to travel in and out if the big city on their bus cards even if we arent there and are expected to utilize public transportation on their own during the day unless it's an emergency, they all now have their own devices that we dont put trackers on). But what they do not see is the rules/process to get there, the fact that nobody was allowed to have smart phones until high school (eldest had one briefly in jr high but repeatedly broke rules so it was taken away and replaced with a texting phone until we all agreed he was ready to try again--in high school). None of the kids had computers in their rooms until they were juniors in high school (and they bought them themselves, just like they pay monthly for their cell phone line).

My kids have gone to different cons since they were around 11-12; this is the first year I will not be on site as a condition of their going because they are vets and they will be 18 and 17, but I have been invited to go anyway (probably so I can be mom-bag-of-holding for cosplay shit) and may go anyway (they've offered to buy my badge).

My kids usually tell me things relatively soon. Sometimes I have to pry it out of them. Lots of their friends tell me things. We have spent many hours helping our kids help their friends (and sometimes had to contact other parents, which made our kid/s mad but they later understood why).

Shit still happens though. People do not understand what it is like to drop your trans teen off at a friend's house that you dont know well and then stress vomit all the way home because it happens to be the same day that you hear about a trans teen being lured by "friends" to come over and then is jumped, raped, and/or murdered. Even with all our safeguards we still have had to walk a child through/help them cope/get help to cope with them getting doxxed and getting death and rape threats; and I am sure it will not be the last time no matter how conscientious they are, because none of my kids is interested in walling off from interacting with people and living in a bunker.

There's plenty of people from shit backgrounds and awful parents that dodge bullets and turn out to be mostly functional. There's plenty of people who end up being shitty even though they come from pretty normal to pretty good home environments and people that care for them. There is no magic formula.

You do the best you can for each kid. You try to encourage them to do the best they can for themselves and others. Hopefully your relationship will be strong enough to deal with awkwardness and anger from time to time, since I doubt it is possible to escape that in any relationship.

I know I was a lot better parent before I actually had to start doing it. It never hurts to start thinking about this stuff, though. And I think community is very important as well.

[mietze]

And also:

For those of us who are having to navigate parenting while also coming from a background of abuse and trauma, there are more and more therapists trained in how to help with that also. Because a lot of your instincts from childhood may be very dangerous or ineffective, and nobody is ever going to trigger rage like your children can. If your own attachment was fucked up, it can create a lot of internal emotions as you are providing for your kids what you yourself never received. Some people can tough it out.

But honestly, investing in trauma/attachment focused therapy for myself during each prenatal/postnatal (I get severe depression in pregnancy, not postpartum) and tween/teen period has kept me from making too many destructive mistakes, or at least helped me talk to/apologize/keep the door open for my children. I highly recommend it. Not being shy about getting therapy when needed has helped my kids who felt that they need it at certain parts of their lives have the language and know how of how to ask for help too.

Again. Not a magic formula. No guarantees. But you're never a failure as a parent for needing to ask for help in getting your shit together as you are parenting, IMO. It can be an important family safety thing to do just that.

[buttercup]

Okay saw that photo how is he allowed here? I take back my not giving a shit post. Glad you joined the thread if not just to expedite your excommunication from hobby participation here. Just wow. Your stance is a little clearer.

[mietze]

My apologies, when I am at work it is harder for me to see stuff like that. More information in the temp ban thread.