Once upon a time I had a Twitter account. No teens followed me and life was good. I could tweet whatever I wanted. Then teens started for follow me. So, I changed accounts. They found me again. Like trying to get rid of cockroaches I tell you. So, I decided to say "To heck with it!" I am still gonna tweet my life and if they can't deal with it then they can fly away.
Soon I had a small following of people who were half of my age and were friends with my bio teens. Most have been over to the house more times than anyone could count. At some point I figured that I had better come up with some guidelines on how I relate to them in this space. Boundaries, so to speak.
So, here are my twitter ground rules for the next generation (These rules apply to my behavior, they are not a requirement for your behavior.)
1) If you follow me, I shall follow you back.
2) What happens on Twitter stays on Twitter...unless I suspect suicide: then I am going to pull out ALL the stops.
3) I will not DM you. Anything an adult has to say to a teen needs to be able to stand up to public scrutiny.
4) I will creep your timeline and your list of follows/following. Mostly looking for the bad kind of creepy creepers.
5) Once in a while I will pray for you. You are welcome to pray for me as much as you would like.
6) I may ask you thought provoking questions. If you don't like it, don't answer it.
7) You may ask me questions. I will either answer them honestly, or dodge them openly. But, I shall not lie about the answer.
8) If the other rules don't work for you, block me or ask me to quit following you and then quit following me. Or, feel free to challenge me on the rules and I will try to find a way to amend them.
9) My Linked-in account is G rated, strictly business. My FaceBook account is PG/PG-13 as I have lots of middle school aged teens following me there, and my mother. My Twitter account tends to have an R rated nature about it. I trust that anyone following me there has heard the word "fuck" on more that one occasion, and has probably even used it once or twice.
10) Kindly don't give the bio-teens shit about what I say on Twitter...you wouldn't like to get crap about your parentals. Would you?
11) I spend a lot of my life chaperoning church teens. The world of youth ministry hasn't caught up to the electronic age yet. Linda B has my FaceBook and Twitter passwords. It is her prerogative to decide if she wants to check to make sure that I am not sending creepy messages to teens. Any adult that has 'secrets' with teens needs to not be working in their space.
This blog seems like it doesn't really have a great way to wrap up the topic. So I'll just post it anyhow, perhaps one day I will come up with a clever conclusion.
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