Even grounding children, in the day and age, has gone digital, it seems. Parents have now adopted the high tech art of family discipline -by snatching cellphones, blocking Facebook pages, pulling the plug on PlayStation. When Lantha Carley’s high-schooler got a midterm grade report that contained letters of the alphabet that were not A, B or C, she decreed there would be no more Facebook until he delivered a report card with better grades.
"He lived with no lasting damage," the Washington Post quoted Carley as saying.
"It’s a modern version of grounding," said Richard Weissbourd, a Harvard psychologist and author of ’The parents we mean to be.’
"It’s like taking away a weekend or a couple of weekends. It’s a deprivation of social connections in the same way," he added.
In a report earlier this year that captured part of the trend, 62 percent of parents said they had taken away a cellphone as punishment, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Parents "know how important and vital it is to their teens’ existence," said the report’s co-author Amanda Lenhart.
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Source-ANI