Teens and pre-teens have so many things to contend with these days. They’re battling raging hormones, feeling pressured by the need to be accepted, and always the target of marketing that tries to turn them into good consumers. It’s understandable, then, that they will try to carve out some private space for themselves, free from the watchful eyes of their parents or other authority figures.
However, as parents, we’re naturally concerned about our kids’ ability to make the right decisions — especially concerning age-appropriate behavior. This extends to the way they communicate with their friends and with others. The Internet makes it a little too easy to chat with people we know nothing about, and it can be easy for kids to share too much information with such people.
Teens especially have evolved specialized terms to use when talking with each other over chat; for the most part, these are acronyms for long phrases or shortcut speech for frequently-used words. Most times, they’re perfectly innocent, but there are quite a lot of terms used to convey more salacious ideas.
This list displays 50 such terms, and while it isn’t stated what method was used to qualify them as the “Top 50″, they are concerning. We don’t suggest that you necessarily need to worry about your particular teen’s online behavior — you know your kid best, or should — but if nothing else, this list does expose another side to an otherwise fun and harmless pastime.
Comments
Jessica
May 26th, 2009 - 12:14:39 PM
a few of these look accurate, but are all of these really that prevalent? you could be right, but i dunno. some of these just seem really far off.
1