>This chick is plum crazy. At 16, I wanted to get out of my parents house too, but there was no way I was stupid enough to think going to the West Bank was a good idea.
What the hell is wrong with these kids, today? What ever happened to running off to Hollywood to become famous? Not good enough! Let’s run off to a war torn country. I’m sure there’s lots of cool, fun people there.
Any parent who says that their 16 year old girl has never given them a problem is full of crap. Every 16 year old girl has at some point, driven her parents up the wall. That doesn’t mean she’s breaking laws or failing classes.
It would have been more truthful had her parents said, “She just gave us the usual moody crap that all teenage girls go through, but she’s good kid. We never thought she’d be dumb enough to run off to the freaking Middle East.”
>I think laying blame where it belongs is a start…yes, the guy who lured her is a creep…yes, she was foolish and stupid…but MySpace is NOT Satan. If those parents paid more attention to what their kid did online, this may not have happened. Blaine doesn’t have a computer in her room. She never will. I’ve installed, on our pc, software that tracks every keystroke made, and takes snapshots of viewed pages…not because I don’t trust my child, but because I don’t trust everbody else. She wasn’t allowed to have a MySpace until I had one and knew how it worked and how I could protect her. MySpace is not the problem.
End of rant…sorry.
>I wouldn’t let my daughter have a passport until I knew a lot more about her alleged plans to go to Canada. How does a kid “sneak” off to the Middle East? They’re lucky they found her.
>No worries. I totally agree. Blaming MySpace is just stupid. Kids shouldn’t have a computer in their bed room. And the parents need to take some responsibility for what happened to that girl. The mom is obviously clueless when she says, “I just don’t understand with all these new laws protecting America how a 16-year-old kid could get out of the country.” Hello? It’s not up to the government to do your parenting for you!
However, if you are mature enough to handle the responsibility of driving at 16 then you are mature enough to know whether or not running off to meet some dude in another country is a good idea.
Plus, where did she get the money for the plane ticket? Flying from San Francisco to Las Vegas costs at least $200, I can’t imagine how much it costs to fly half way around the world.
>Maybe the guy she was meeting sent her the money.
I agree she should have known better. Maybe a little exposure to current events and world politics.
My daughter is only 11 but we’ve been talking about the creeps that try to contact kids on the internet and how they might be pretending to be another kid and/or a friend. She has a laptop and we have restricted some things on it. We can look at her activities on it whenever we want.