The Authority In Me: The Power of Family Life in the Network Culture - A Parent's Voice in the Cyber Wilderness

Here’s what others are saying about The Authority In Me

Our children only pass this way once. A parent is and always will be a child's first teacher. This inspirational book reminds parents of their primary role and what happens when parents use their life's gift to influence, guide and place reasonable controls on their offspring. It is a must read for all who want to take back their children.

--Dr. Susan G. Weinberger, The Mentor Consulting Group, Norwalk, Connecticut

I love it! …It was as though I was having a conversation with a good, well informed friend. I thoroughly enjoyed the read, while appreciating the important message to parents to get involved. Their children’s lives may depend on it.

--Sheriff Edward Bonner, Placer County, California

The Authority In Me:

The Power of Family Life in the Network Culture

- A Parent’s Voice in the Cyber Wilderness

By J.M. Jullien

Copyright 2011

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.

Contact: J.M. Jullien

Email: Jullien@surewest.net

ISBN:978-0-615-48579-9

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase you own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Author’s dedication:

To my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, whose authority to express truth and abundant life delivers us and our children from the manipulations of our time.

To my beloved husband and sons who have always appreciated and sought to understand me, even when I use too many words.

Thanks for giving me your attention and a place in your hearts.

In loving memory of Adam Johns,

a magnificent son to his family and our community.

Acknowledgments

This book is the product of the kindness, love and support of a caring community. Thanks to all of the professionals in various fields including law enforcement, education, faith leadership, health care, parents and youth for offering insights and observations that help promote a strengthening of family and community relations rooted in faith, truth and hope for the future.

In particular, this is to acknowledge family and friends who took time to review, comment and provide technical support: Scott Montgomery, Bob Montgomery, David R. Lema, Christy Crandell, Ryan Crandell, Cindy Uhler, Christi Benz, Susan Weinberger, Jon Daily, Marcia Jullien, Amy Jullien, Gus Jullien, Debbie Parisi, and Shari Crow.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Introduction - Silent Majority

Cyber Parenting with a Purpose

What To Do?

Chapter 1 - The Digital Native

The Disconnects of Network Technology

Fear Based Paradigms of the Network Culture

The Great Home Invasion

Chapter 1 Summary

Chapter 2 - Genuine Authority

Genuine Authority is a Matter of Faith

Parental Rights - Constitutional Amendment?

Chapter 2 - Summary

Chapter 3 - The Folly of Modern Thinking about Parenting

An Important Voice Lost

Post Industrial Authoritarian Model

Modern Egalitarian Model

Ego-Centric Consumer Model

Mother Reformed

Reformed Mom is a Process

Protective Cover of Parental Authority

Helicopter Parenting

Problem versus Predicament

Why do parents hover into the adult worlds of their children?

What Really Matters?

Chill Pill

Authority to Be the Change You Want to See in the World

Chapter 3 - Summary

Chapter 4 -Network Pressure and Shaping Character

Network Pressure

Near Misses with My Young Digital Native

Social Media

Victim Mentality of Cyberbullying

Stand Alone Behavior

My Happy Child, My Happiness

Parents Catering to Children’s Success

Custodial Networking

Trust and Verify

Chapter 4 Summary

Chapter 5 - Security Comes from Within

Family Authority Surrendered into Silence

Patrolling Our Thoughts and Domain of Self

Self-Governance, the Law, and Personal Security

Chapter 5 - Summary

Chapter 6 - Authority of the Indomitable Human Spirit

Redemption: When Children Do the Unthinkable

What to do? Trust and Verify

For the Children, Break the Code of Silence

Privacy and Parental Authority

Ryan Crandell’s Story

Jeff Mason’s Story

Forgiveness Matters

Demonstrating Forgiveness and Accountability to Your Child

It’s a Power Thing

Chapter 6 - Summary

Chapter 7 -The First Decade - Relationships and Rules

Matters of the Heart and Mind: Mentoring, the Doctor Is In

Establishing Boundaries

Social Media and Personal Security

Respect for the Law

The Law, Your Child, and Parenting

Modeling Respect for the Law- Distracted Driving

Fundamentals of the Law and Your Minor Child - Check List for Parents

The Law and Cyber Technology (Texting and Social Media)

The Fundamentals of House Rules

Rules Must Strengthen Relationships

Chapter 7 - Summary

Chapter 8 - Second Decade - Verify Expectations, Listen, Build Trust

Parents, Don’t Become a High School Drop Out

Parental Blind Spots

Overcoming Blind Spots

Parent Involvement with the Student

Establish a United Front with Teachers

Release-Risk Paradox

Active Listening to Establish Rapport

Unplug and Reconnect

Build and Maintain Trust

Truth, Honesty and Lies

Chapter 8 - Summary

Epilogue: Faith and Parenting

Bibliography

Appendices

Appendix A -I Wish I had Known by Christy Crandell

Appendix B - Digital Natives Rules of Engagement

Appendix C - Cyber Safe House Rules

Appendix D - Custodial Networking Sheet

Appendix E - A Teenager’s Guide: How to Get Mom Off My Back, She’s Driving Me Nuts!

Appendix F - How to Inspire Kids to Do Chores

Appendix G When Your Child is the Target

Discussion Questions

About the Author

Prologue

Little progress can be made merely by attempting to repress what is evil; our great hope lies in developing what is good. – Calvin Coolidge

I am a mom who became a journalist during the last leg of rearing my youngest son. For me this was a matter of life and death.

There are six and one half years between my sons. The oldest is 26 and the youngest turned 20 in December 2010. With the advent of the mobile phone and the Internet, I noticed a profound difference between their teenage years which I attribute to the network culture. It is a difference that can be summed up in two words: digital native.

Digital natives are children of the Web; they cannot imagine a world without the Internet.

In this environment, children at very early ages can be conditioned to believe that adults are essentially obsolete – they simply need to be tolerated or manipulated. We are perfunctory characters who pay the bills, chauffer from activity to event, staff classrooms and campus administrations, patrol the streets to enforce the law, and yet we are so amazingly irritating, ignorant and irrelevant.

I am American raised in the 1960s and 1970s – a product of a cultural revolution (women’s liberation, civil rights, and student riots) and a time of shedding traditional thought in the name of freedom. Biblical wisdom was for the most part tossed aside, denied, rejected.

Yes, Jullien is my maiden name.

The oldest of five children raised in the Catholic faith in Oakland, California, I graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a degree in Social Anthropology, married my high school sweet heart and we raised two sons in the Sacramento, California region. I had worked my way through school with part time employment at a local supermarket on College Avenue in Oakland. At Berkeley, under the direction of the late Alan Dundes, a dynamic, renowned folklorist who delivered interesting, compelling and sometimes controversial insights on many topics of modern culture including football, I completed an honors thesis on corporate culture (Supermarket Folklore). It was awarded the Kroeber Prize from the Department of Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley, and was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. To produce the manuscript, I drew upon a combination of personal experience as laborer in the supermarket, field research (interviews with fellow employees and employees at other stores in the area) and scholastic research.

Near the end of my time as a student at Berkeley, I left the supermarket to work as a teller for a large bank with a branch on campus. The Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) was introduced during my short tenure there before graduating. I remember being incensed that the management was giving tellers direction to send people outside to a computerized machine to do their banking; my gut was concerned for the lack of personal interaction. It was very disturbing to me the notion that a machine could replace a person. In one of the staff meetings when a regional manager was explaining all the ways tellers needed to redirect the customers to do their banking outside, and the incentives for tellers to keep them doing business with the machine, I remember speaking out.

I am not confident that discouraging customers from having personal contact is the best way to strengthen the business relationship.

This comment was deflected and the regional manager stressed emphatically we were to comply with the directive to send people outside to the machine. There would be no discussion. And ATMs of course eventually became a very acceptable way to do banking business.

Thirty years later, however, banking has come full circle and encourages customers to come inside the bank and have human contact. The ATM still offers amazing convenience, along with on-line banking, and plays a role in the efficient, convenient service of standard banking transactions but it could never replace the actual human connection. Banks are competing now on customer friendly service.

That experience many years ago as a bank teller feeling replaced by a machine on the campus branch helped inspire for me a sense of purpose to strengthen relationships and enhance the human experience in very technical or technology-driven environments.

Upon graduation from Berkeley, I began married and family life with a strong professional interest in understanding how technology could be leveraged to strengthen relationships. I sought to apply the field work and behavioral and system analysis capabilities I developed from research on corporate culture to help people use technology to work better together, achieve goals and solve problems. Accordingly, I assumed project-oriented roles that involved execution of capital and labor-intensive projects and operations, the development of systems and procedures to achieve performance objectives, and marketing through strategic relationships in manufacturing, information technology, and environmental management fields (energy management).

Working full time outside the home, my husband and I juggled shifts and duties to cover the action at the office, home, school and sports events.

And then six years ago, I found myself struggling with the question of how technology impacts the home.

In this boundary-less, anything goes, no limits, it’s all about me network culture I sensed the role of the parent being edged out, or pushed to the side. To me it felt like a digital chasm. In an instant, our children have access to knowledge, information and people in every nook and cranny around the globe. Some of the messages, beliefs and ideas are good, and much of the content is not in alignment with our values or rooted in truth.

Digital natives believe that all they need to know can be gleaned by Googling the topic or question of the day.

In the summer of 2004, when my youngest entered 8th grade, I decided to quit working outside the home because I sensed a disconnect between children (peer groups) and adults, and parent communities were increasingly less engaged with our children’s cyber-powered lives.

The old marketing adage, perception is reality has never been more true for parenting.

So I created a quarterly publication to inform and inspire parents called Banana Moments: Family Business Quarterly (http://www.bananamoments.com). This publication examines youth culture, popular culture and cyber trends and with insights and lessons learned from various professionals in law enforcement, education, health care and service industries, parents and children. Banana Moments is designed to help parents with thought leadership as executives of their homes who must contend with many of the same issues corporate CEOs had to with the advent of the Internet.

In addition to presenting banana moments fieldwork and research about how the network culture transforms family business, this book applies my perspectives and insights as an American mom whose journey into womanhood incorporated some scrapes including an attempted rape and the threat of a stalker; and who received the blessings of devoted parents and siblings, a husband who is my soul mate and best friend for life, and two magnificent sons.

In the process of struggling to be a good wife, mother and professional manager in my career, I learned more about the power of God’s love in the past 25 years being a parent than I could learn in 25 lifetimes. Truthfully there were many times I did not feel qualified but managed to become a mother reformed.

And so on the cover of this book is a photo of the roses my son’s planted for me on Mother’s Day in 2009. They wanted to give me a better view because my office window looked out to the side of the house where the garbage cans and dog house are stored. These roses remind me that no matter how imperfect we are as parents, that no matter how many mistakes we make, no matter how far we stray, our children are resilient blessings; and it is by God’s grace that we all have the free will to choose to live our lives in truth, or surrender to the manipulations of our time.

So I write this book because it is how I choose to please God. Fifty years of family and career life have affirmed for me that the same faith of the founding fathers of the United States of America gives us the genuine authority to lead children to higher ground in an environment that is hostile to wisdom and will transform us into perfunctory connections posing as a relationship if we allow it.

Parents need to understand that our voice of wisdom cannot always be heard because the distracted lives we lead, constantly multi-tasking with steams of media channels 24 hours a day, seven days a week, can put our voices on mute. In the network culture there are no boundaries and our children, if they are not tethered to truth, are at risk of becoming extremely insecure, surrendering their personal security and authority to the lies and distractions of friend communities, popular culture, commercial interests and bad actors.

More importantly, this is an exciting time to be a parent. In response to this digital chasm we have the opportunity to connect with our children in authentic ways that strengthen the bond between parent and child making the home a sanctuary, and ultimately enable us to leverage the ‘Net’ for our own life’s purpose.

Thankfully, our children seek this authenticity from us.

Introduction - Silent Majority

As goes the state of child rearing, so goes the state of the nation. -John Rosemond

When I was a small child, perhaps four years old, I had a nightmare that my voice disappeared and I was immobile. In the room at the top of the stairs, I was speaking but there was no sound. As if the volume was on mute. I sat in the window bench in my bedroom. No matter how loud I tried to raise my voice, I sat on the bench feeling helpless and hopeless and wondering why my voice had been taken away and why I could not move.

At first I thought this was frightening –not being able to summon help. And then I realized -- it was worse than that and a feeling of dread overcame me. All my thoughts, feelings, concerns, needs and desires didn’t matter because they could not be expressed. I was feeling defective and ineffective; I could not make a difference.

I didn’t matter.

As I write this, my sons are 26 and 20 years old in December of 2010. And they will tell you I never once lost my voice in all the years they have enjoyed me as their mother (wink, wink, nod, nod), and how there were many times they wished I had lost my voice. Today my youngest prefers texting I am certain because the sound of my voice is very annoying.

That dream of a four-year-old girl feeling powerless has haunted me, and it wasn’t until recently that I realized how prophetic that dream was for me as a parent.

The difference between the teenage years of our two sons has been a profoundly amazing experience and call to action – to help give a voice to the silent majority of parents in America today.

There is a silent majority of parents in our culture today who are overwhelmed by the pressures to conform to the truths twisted into lies and amplified in the network culture. In an instant (over the past six years) children have been provided their own personal cyber enterprises powered by non-stop connections to the World Wide Web, and unchecked this technology introduces a disruption to family relations unparalleled in human history. As a result there is an enormous challenge for parents to lead, and train children to be capable of discerning truth from sophistry, and exercise self-governance at earlier ages.

Simply put, the Internet and mobile phones represent the great home invasion of our time.

This book is the result of my personal and family life experience, observations and research over the past 25 years raising two sons. I have witnessed tremendous, increasing anxiety among parents (including me) and reluctance in our parenting culture to enforce the norms for what is legal and safe for our children.

In order to contend with the social change spurred by network technology that have impacted family life, I quit working outside the home seven years ago and conducted research and sought out the many voices of other parents, children, professionals, educators, law enforcement officials that when combined offer a 360 degree view of what is happening with our children today, and reveal the true demands for effective parenting.

Mostly I have come to appreciate how vital it is that our parenting culture reclaims its genuine authority as an expression of God’s love.

This particular lesson was driven deep in my heart in April 2007 when teenage burglars invaded six homes in my neighborhood over a four-week period. They were 15, perhaps 16 years old, and they were very skilled at identifying the routines when people would leave their homes for morning errands. And because our neighborhood was quiet and relatively crime free, there were often a door or window left unlocked.

In the middle of the morning, on a weekday when they should have been in school, these kids entered the homes, ransacked them and took loose change and cash and mementos, or personal items such as a child’s backpack or a sweatshirt.

My home was the sixth and last home they burglarized.

I walked in on them and they fled outside my backdoor before I could see them, but I did see the change jar from the laundry room on the kitchen counter, and the kitchen door to the backyard was wide open. There was no question it was the teenagers.

I grabbed the cordless land line phone on the kitchen counter, dialed 9-1-1 and walked back through the front door anticipating they would hop the fence to the front yard, which they did.

As I had 9-1-1 on the line, the two boys, one of them big and tall, looking very much like my own son, and the other one shorter and slight build, with a gray hoodie sweatshirt covering his head, looked straight ahead was following with two steps for the one giant stride of the tall one; they power-walked along the fence of my neighbor’s yard. I walked along my porch and pathway onto the front lawn, trying to keep up with them. They were walking very fast… as if they were late for a meeting or something.

Have a nice day ma’am, said the taller kid. By his tone you would have thought he just finished bagging my groceries, looking straight ahead so I could not get a good look at his face.

He had big, rosy cheeks and a clean haircut, wearing a gray t-shirt and jeans. He looked like any kid in our neighborhood. I wanted to grab him by the ear and hold him down until his mother could come and get him.

As soon as they heard me say to the 9-1-1 dispatcher, I caught two teenage burglars in my home, the boys took off running down the street towards the home of my friend and neighbor. They had parked the car at the end of the street outside our cul-de-sac and were hopping into the black Ford truck as my neighbor and her son looked on.

Stop them! I was screaming while running down the middle of the street like a mad woman, They just robbed my house! Stop them! They just robbed my house! After a couple of seconds she realized these were the teenage burglars. She was able to get a partial license plate as they sped away around the corner.

While I was chasing the teens down the street, with the phone to my ear, the dispatcher kept ordering me to go back to my home. I found out later from the neighbors that she must have alerted every cop in town that the Mad mom was going to kill these teens. Apparently the cul-de-sac was swarming with police while I was inside the home going over what was missing and disturbed to get fingerprints. When I emerged from my home with the remaining police officer documenting the incident, my neighbors were standing along the property line of my front lawn near our mailbox.

Their faces were ashen.

I thought someone had died. And then I realized they thought I had died, as the police did not explain what was happening but there were a lot of them and they were everywhere.

The first officer who responded to this call, told me I should not have entered the home or chased the teens because it was dangerous. They could have hurt you, he said as we walked inside. These are other people’s children, I told the officer, "When we are afraid of other people’s children, we might as well throw in the towel. Lord of the Flies here we come."

With this string of burglaries the entire neighborhood reverberated with anger and fear.

And my concern was for the safety of these teens and the residents of the next home they targeted. These kids had been on a roll. They had hit six homes in our neighborhood over four weeks – and still they were not caught. I was worried their crimes would escalate if unchecked. God forbid, were it my child involved, I would want responsible adults to try to stop them.

So I prepared a flyer with a description of the teens, the car they used, and the unique trophy items they stole from the homes. The flyer read, STOP THESE TEENS BEFORE THEY GET HURT OR HURT SOMEONE. I brought it to the high school district and to the local high school. I emailed it to all my contacts in the area, and the newspaper carrier distributed them, and my letter to the editor of the local newspaper was published on this urgent call to action.

I canvassed the neighborhood and spoke with anyone willing to listen to assure them that the burglars are kids. There were a lot of relieved faces when neighbors heard that I had chased them away. After all, I’m just a mom and these burglars are other people’s children.

It was very difficult keeping the police on this case.

I had searched across the country to find a photo from the designer of a unique hoodie sweatshirt worn by one of the assailants, which resembled the one stolen from one of the first homes they burglarized. It was a brand called: Ezekiel. After some cajoling, the case was assigned to a detective who took the photo to the home where we believe the burglars had friends. It was the party house where there was no adult supervision what so ever. Parents were completely absent.

I truly feared for these teens’ lives. They had stirred up a hornet’s nest in our neighborhood.

We had a neighborhood watch meeting at our home a few weeks after the incident. Our home was overflowing with people. And there was anger and frustration that the police had not demonstrated more diligent effort to secure these kids.

Eventually, I was on the phone trying to get the police to respond to another sighting of a car resembling the one the burglars used to escape, when a sergeant gave me a lecture about being selfish and a horrible person for trying to bump my case ahead of others. She thought I was worried about recovering the loose change stolen from our laundry room or my husband’s nano iPod with the