First thing Monday morning my husband told me the news about the Las Vegas shooting. It was a news alert on his phone and he gasped as he shared the awful news with me. We both poured over the little bit of information that was available about what had happened. Just the weekend before we were both in Las Vegas which made everything hit home just a little bit more. I immediately jumped on Facebook to check on two friends of mine that I knew were at the concert to see if they were safe. Thank goodness they were not harmed physically but were definitely traumatized by the whole situation.

Over the next few days, I kept hearing stories of friends of ours that had loved ones there. One friend had a loved one that was shot in the leg and was one of the 500 injured. Two Manhattan Beach residents including a middle school teacher (Sandra Casey) and police department employee (Rachael Parker) were killed. I know many of you had friends and family there as well, and my thoughts and prayers are...

We get many requests to address parental control apps in our social media classes. In fact, recently a friend of mine had asked me how to handle an incident she had with her 15 year old son. While confiscating his phone after getting in trouble, she saw that he had messaged every girl in his contact list on Snap Chat to "exchange nudes".

She was livid and needed advice on how to handle this!! She decided to delete the app off his device and take his phone away for a few weeks. During that time he downloaded the app on a different device and was accessing his account. 

This got me thinking A LOT! What do parents do in situations like this?  What would you do in a situation like this?  The question of how much monitoring should I do is a gray area for parents and we struggle with the right answer.  And really the right answer is, it depends.  That can be the frustrating part.  What I mean is ideally when a child gets a device (e.g. cell phone, tablet, laptop) parents need to consider t...

Our first Tip is to Prep!

Are you ready to have THE Talk? Many times parents are wondering if their child is ready to learn about sex and growing up, but often times the real question is Are YOU Ready? Have you taken the time to think about what your beliefs and values are and which you’d like to leave behind and which you’d like to instill in your child.  A great place to start is to inventory where you learned about sex. What values did your parents instill in you? What beliefs and values do you have about sexuality?

How about your partner? It’s equally important to have important conversations with your co-parent about this topic. Get on the same page and discuss tactics and timing of your talks. You both need to talk to them as well. Don’t leave this up to one parent to do. Kids need both of your perspectives. If you are a single parent or separated from your child’s parent it may be difficult to get on the same page. You could start with letting him or her know that you ar...

Before we dive in and get into the 10 toughest questions, I want to go over some quick guidelines no matter what your child's question is, because let's face it, there's more than 10.  So, in general, some things to keep in mind always when your child is asking a question that is a sex related question, or even just a question that really surprises you is you want to do your best to have a poker face. Meaning, try not to show your emotion if it's one that's shocked, embarrassed, or maybe concerned. You don't want to show that expression on your face right away. What that will do is shut the door to them talking to you. That's definitely what you don't want to have happen.

The other thing you want to be really careful about is your tone. Your tone says so much. Next to your body language, it's the second most powerful communication tool that we have. So, if you say, "Where did you hear that?" Or, "Where did you hear that?" Is different than, "Huh, where did you hear that?" The tone ...