Daily Journal #5

There are most likely many kids these days that do not understand what punishment really is. All I hear people talk about when they get grounded from something all they can say is that they just hate their parents and that they are just “stupid”, but I never hear them say anything about why they were grounded. One time I heard somebody talking about how stupid it was that they got grounded and then somebody asked them why they were and they said something along the lines that they were annoying him and then he cussed them out. I had no idea that it was now apparently acceptable to swear at parents.

Now that most kids do not go out of the house much besides to go hang out with their friends, the old ways of punishment have become, well, obsolete. It is not enough to just ground them so that they can not leave the house because they, or we I should really say, have cell phones, iPods®, Xbox 360s®, and computers. With all of this technology, we can still do pretty much anything that we would do normally except that we would not do it in person. There’s Skype® and Google+® so that we can have video chats, and also there’s Facetime® for the iPhone®. There are computer games which can keep us entertained for hours upon hours very easily.

For a real punishment, it has to do something with taking away a certain privilege, like a cell phone, the computer, or video games etc. Most kids, and most likely including me, would and do have “withdraws” from not having our phones because we have been attached to them; constantly talking to people, mostly through texts. Some kids now a day spend way, way too much time on the computer and on video game consoles. Sometimes it becomes excessive.

One thing, though, that I think has not changed is that parents can still threaten to take away the car; it is a very quick way to scare the kid into behaving because without the car, we have no way to get anywhere and I personally do not like bumming rides off of people because I did something stupid and got my car taken away.