OnTeensToday.com Vanessa Van Petten is the teen author of the book “You’re Grounded!”—a parenting book from a young perspective. She keeps an active teen blog for parents who want to know what their kids are really doing online, at High School parties or when parents are looking the other way. Her candid and young perspective, as well her constant survey of resources and updates about this generation of young people are a treasure trove for parents. I was on the perfect track. Was student body president of an upper snuff Los Angeles private school. Got accepted into a top 20 University and became a Mandarin and East Asian Studies major before the wave hit?????–so everyone was in desperate need of white female Asia specialists. Wrote an honors thesis and graduated Magna Cum Laude. I had a bid from a top investment banking firm in New York—everything was perfect. It… Read More
parents
Beginnings
As adults with college age or twenty-something kids, you’ve seen a lot of changes in our society and definitely in the working world. And your kids saw some of those changes happen, whether they were very aware of them or not. For those young people what they saw was ‘The Way Life Is’. So the dot com boom and the incredible money that many people in their twenties made, the huge press that these people got, along with the toys, homes, and subsequent opportunities is probably one of their assumptions about ‘The Way It Is’. Add to that the rise of women in a whole host of careers and the relatively new expectation that women can and should be able to achieve any professional level they want if they’re willing to go for it. Then add the incredible rise in Celebrity Star Power and Reality TV stardom, where the value… Read More
Support for Helicopter Busy Parents
You know I read a lot. Lately there are a lot of articles around about helicopter parents…parents who hover over their kids seems to be the usual definition of this phenomenon. These articles have been cropping up a lot lately because school’s just started and administrators are aggravated by these ‘over involved’ parents, and parents are now getting worried that they are becoming this type of parent if they are trying to be helpful to their kids. Well, I’m in favor of parental involvement. I’m in favor of parents educating themselves about what the world offers and how important it is for parents to know what kids are facing in the world. Parents shouldn’t be doing for their kids what their kids can do for themselves, but there’s nothing wrong with parents or teachers or other mentors showing kids how to do something the first time. Why not help someone… Read More
