#sheltering

Today at Pemberley, The 18th of February:

After only one day of captivity in the house, Mrs. Elizabeth Darcy became desperate to be out of doors. While the snow had finally halted its prolific self-production, it lay thick across the ground. This did not dissuade Mrs. Darcy from dressing warmly and charging out into the snow.

Mr. Darcy accompanied her as far as the edge of the cleared path, watching from solid ground as his wife attempted to traverse the garden. Her gait followed a pattern of struggle and sink.

Mr. Darcy called to her, “Is this entirely wise?”

“Nothing is ever entirely wise,” she called back, her voice warbled on the last word as she struggled and sank into a particularly deep patch, finding herself surrounded by snow all the way to her hips.

“Let me rephrase, is this at all necessary. Where are you going?”

“On a walk!” She exclaimed, though despite her struggling she only sank farther down into her current spot.

For a time, Mr. Darcy watched his wife in silent amusement as she flailed around. The snow surrounding her made for poor leverage, simply compressing down on itself when she thrust her arms against it.

“Eliza, should I come pull you out?”

“You were very clear this morning that you would not set foot in the snow.”

“That is true, but I prefer you as a wife rather than a block of ice.”

Mrs. Darcy gave up her struggling, finally admitting, “I would appreciate your help. My toes feel like ghosts at the end of my feet.”

getting a tumblr really was one of the best things that ever happened to me in 2023

let me explain

so i have very… sheltering parents. they like to control what im watching and listening to, they don’t like me having social media. not an insane amount, but just like… to make sure i don’t see or hear anything completely appropriate, cos i am 13 years old. maybe control is the wrong word. but you know what i mean.

the problem with this is, it means that i don’t tend to know about current affairs/events that happen in the world/any major issues going on. not like in a way that lead me to have wrong ideas about anything, like for example the LGBTQ+ community, but in a way that means that i don’t know anything about that community… at all. i didn’t know what the word gay meant until much more recently than probably anyone else on this site. i don’t hear anything about the Palestinian occupation, because my parents will always turn the radio off if it’s talking about something “upsetting”. i mean fuck, i barely knew anything was going on in the middle east until i got a tumblr.

its not that i had the wrong opinion, it’s not that i support israel. i just didn’t have an opinion. full stop.

so when i got a tumblr, i had to very quickly catch up on everything that’s happened… ever. like yes i updated myself on the Palestinian occupation, i learnt what the rest of the letters in the LGBTQ+ acronym were, what they stood for, and what those words meant. but the way i grew up meant that i never heard very much music on the radio, just whatever my parents wanted to listen to. which would’ve been fine, because we have similar music taste. but it was getting genuinely ridiculous. to give an example, i never heard the song Blank Space until 2023.

2023.

that song came out in 2014. hell, it was RE released in 2023. people would sing popular songs and ask me why i didn’t know them. what was i supposed to tell them? that my parents didn’t listen to that music, so i didn’t either?

so why did they act like that? were they scared, for example, that i would become LGBTQ+ if i ever found out that that community existed? nope. i came out at bisexual to my parents February 2023, and they were both pretty ok with it (it was awkward and still is, but they’re not homophobic). were they worried id upset myself by finding out about the horrific things happening to innocent Palestinians? well, even if they were, it’s better that i know, so that i can try to do something about it. nothing can change if we’re all kept in the dark, right?

so. in November 2023, i got me a tumblr. found out about it from Pinterest, which my parents would also kill me for having. i love this site. i love my moots. my parents will never know.

thanks for reading, i guess. i don’t really know where i was going with that, but i am pretty pissed at my parents for not letting me find out about fucking current events. letting me listen to normal pop music like a lot of teens do. i may only be 13, but im not stupid. and they’ll never find my tumblr.

I don’t get really involved with the whole shipping thing.

But I am an educator who will be the first to tell you that kids are going to get ahold of things that they perhaps shouldn’t. Teens will even get around web filters on school property because let’s be honest, teens are better with tech than most school IT departments.

I’m for explaining to kids (preferably beforehand) why certain things aren’t okay for them and why it needs to be avoided/restricted at this time (or in the case of pedophilia, always). This “it’s just bad, must shelter the children” mindset is incredibly toxic. Kids are incredibly curious and they’re going to explore things that they shouldn’t if they don’t have proper guidance on how to handle it.

I lived through the earlier part of the War on Drugs/DARE and the Zero Tolerance policies. We were told “Don’t do drugs” in 5th grade. My high school had a massive drug problem. Drugs were sold openly on campus. Our zero tolerance on violence didn’t work either.

Parents need to learn to guide their kids through life instead of completely sheltering them. I certainly don’t oppose parental controls on technology but they aren’t full proof (I was one of those kids that got around parental blocks quite easily). The adult currently responsible for the child is the one responsible to ensure that the internet is used in a safe and age appropriate manner.

As content creators, we don’t have a legal responsibility to shelter kids from any possible objectionable content outside doing what a reasonable person would do, which is tagging, appropriate titles, and having a warning text/splash screen warning. And the fact that children aren’t legally supposed to be on most social media websites and only get on via lying about their age/name/etc.

As for adults, you literally can’t expect everyone on the internet to cater to every possible problem you might have with content on the internet. I have PTSD. I check titles and tags (that is what they are there for) and if I find something triggering despite that, I click out. Unless it actually violates community guidelines for that specific website, I don’t report it (not like reporting abuse against autistics has actually worked most of the time).