Parenting in the age of cyberbullying
[Music]
i could talk to you about a myriad of
things about
my media career i could talk to you
about like to be on a powerful platform
like radio
or what it’s like to build a business
but instead
this day on this gorgeous day
i decided to talk to you about something
that i’ve been wrestling with for the
past two years
and that is how to love our children
and this has been a question in my life
for the past years because a very
important pivotal moment that took place
and now hindsight when i look back i can
see that there was a cleansing
that was brewing i was tired my days
were long
and they all just flowed one into the
other they all started looking the same
but meanwhile when i looked around i had
built a successful business
i had successfully transitioned my
career from talk radio
to music radio work was good
my youngest child was being as expected
you know
gentlemanly kind boy devoted to family
and friends
and my oldest child had finished high
school she was doing her first year at
university at one of the best
institutions in this country
she was living out of home closer to
school and really exploring and
exploiting life
after school reveling in being a young
adult
and this is the picture of progress that
i had worked very hard for
as a single parent for many years i’d
worked painstakingly hard to get to that
point
but the reality is that i was feeling
anxious
i was emotionally and physically
exhausted
i was detached from the highs and the
lows and i was becoming increasingly
cynical
about life about success about all sorts
of things and it was on
sunday the 22nd of october 2017.
i decided to forego my usual yoga class
and decided to lie
in have a slow start to the day and i
was woken up by the incessant
calls from a friend
and i woke up picked up the phone and
the first thing he said was are you guys
okay
and unknowingly i said yeah we are and
he realized that i had no clue what was
happening
he said you haven’t looked at twitter
have you
and with those words a feeling of dread
came upon me a fear of things
unknown just rushed over my body
and i immediately knew that something
had happened on twitter
that had to do with my oldest child my
daughter
and as i said she was first-year student
enjoying life after high school
they had gone out the night before as a
group of friends to attend a concert of
a music group that they absolutely adore
but in the early hours of the morning
someone unknown to us had tweeted
falsehoods
about the group of girls and
specifically targeted
my daughter and so
in her efforts to disprove these
falsehoods
the situation inadvertently got worse
and it sparked a deluge
of cyberbullying some of the most
the worst things that you could have
said about someone
false tweets were created and were
attributed to her
and i had decided to enter the fray
decided to enter
these feeding waters to defend her
because i was determined that she
wouldn’t drown
alone by the end of the attack by the
end of the cyber bullying
by the end of this piranha-like feeding
frenzy over 40
000 tweets had been posted about her
and i and as i said some of the ugliest
most
meanest things that you could say and i
can i stand here confidently and say
that
the allegations and the forces that were
posted were indeed a lie because a
subsequent investigation
proved them so but what had left was
absolute devastation it was one of the
most painful day
of our lives we supported each other
firmly in the aftermath of
the cyber of the cyber bullying
but beyond that we had to pull apart
find our own healing
and then find a way to come back
together again
what had precipitated after that
was that she started cutting something
she’d never done before
she suffers from post-traumatic stress
disorder
depression she’s had bouts of depression
panic attacks as well as anxiety
we both sought counseling and i’ve since
discovered a deep passion for the
outdoors
for hiking it’s what gives me sanity and
i’ve also discovered the beauty and the
magic
of breath work and through lots of tears
lots of long
deep moments together
we’ve also gotten a sense of how to
relate differently
how to exist and occupy the space that
we share
as family as parent and child
she went on to get professional help as
i was relating and it’s been quite a
journey since then the road to healing
has been very very challenging
and for me it has brought about an
unfolding
as a parent i describe it as an
unfolding because
after all this time the wrestling that
we’ve done
we emerge and we continue to emerge
there are some things that i want to
share with you today that
i look back on over the past years as
profound lessons
that i’ve gotten from this experience
from being
a parent to this particular child
and the first lesson is that our
children
are here to live their lives they’re
here to live
their purpose they’re not a 2.0 version
their lives are not a 2.0 version
of ours they’re not here to live
according to a script
that we craft for them because who are
we
we’re simply here to take care of them
to bring them into this world to take
care of them
long enough make sure they survive long
enough for them to realize
their purpose and their potential
when this incident happened i kicked
into gear as a parent would i was raised
by a single parent who brought us up
on a nurse’s salary she did it with
great focus
she did it with grace but she also did
it with a lot of control
and in raising my own children as a
freelancer
this is a this is an industry that it
has a lot of uncertainty
so in order for you to build a life and
to build a life that works you need a
system
need a tight system and so i raised my
children with a lot of control
and so when the cyber bullying happened
i did what i always do
i come up with a plan i designed a
strategy because i said to her
if you follow this if we do this you
will emerge whole again
on the other side and my frustration
erupted because of course my child would
say no i’m going to do it my own way
she did the counseling she followed
through with that
what i didn’t want for her was for to
return to social media
but instead she did she went back boldly
and bravely
and decided to share her story she
shared images
of the cutting she talked about the bad
days
the hard days when she wrestled with
depression when she was asking herself
deep questions about why
this happened she was very open and i
now look back
and i look at the strategy that i
presented that she rejected
and can see that in it there was a sense
of saying
you should be ashamed of this you should
hold this shame by not returning to the
world
by saying to her stay away i was also
saying that this
is your shame and she went out boldly
and this was an incredible lesson to
live freely
for me when she started her
tertiary education she had decided to go
for a degree that she wasn’t entirely
passionate about but was
an interest but through this process
she has discovered what she’s truly
passionate about
you can imagine growing up as a child in
soweto for me
and growing up under the unjust laws of
apartheid and seeing how it’s suffocated
and smothered
the potential of not just our parents
and their predecessors their hopes and
dreams but i would suffocated ours as
well
i couldn’t finish my degree because we
ran out of money
had to drop out and study later in life
so when your child comes to you
to say that i’m gonna do something else
i’m dropping this degree you can imagine
the rage
and i realized that as parents when our
children do not abide by what we want
we start to withhold the love we close
the taps of love
we silence we ignore we
start to withdraw and withhold
our love from them and that was also a
great lesson
because now i know that by insisting on
our plans and our ambitions for their
lives
we only delay their discovery of their
purpose
we send them on a detour that could
entirely be unnecessary
for their lives
the other lesson that i learned is about
control i think it’s a beautiful design
because a parent and child
are one of that’s it’s the closest
relationship there
is in life in my view
and needing to exercise control over her
decisions
was this challenge that we were now
posed with
and over and above that in the deep and
hard conversations we had it soon became
apparent that it wasn’t just
control that i was exercising but it was
also
a need to appear perfect and
a need to manage fear
and so that’s the beauty of this
intimate relationship
so often as parents we think that we are
the holders of the knowledge
about life and the world but meanwhile
our children can teach us
so much about ourselves they bring into
sharp
focus areas of who we are
that might be limiting that might be
damaging to
us and so having accepted these lessons
from her
i find that i’m like i’m less tightly
wound up
less tightly wound up and i’ve also
discovered that
it’s okay not to have to manage for
every single detail
the parent that i was is that i would
plan i would make sure we execute
i would plan to the degree where i would
want to anticipate how we would
feel down to how we should feel
after we’ve done something it sounds
ridiculous right
and who wants that job who wants that
job ultimately
and for me it was a case of recognizing
that i wasn’t living
fully free so that’s one of the gifts
that it’s given us
as well and it made me realize that
control
is like living in in a golden prison
and it’s freed us of having expectations
of each other that we shouldn’t
necessarily
have for instance now
i judge less about their choices
about their careers about their
interests
i’m not as judgmental about how they
choose to appear
in the world and i just take a step back
to say
this is your life this is your journey
because ultimately their gifts their
journeys and their purpose
are theirs to live out and they might
not even be connected to the families
that they come through
this was my final the one of the lessons
i thought to share today
throughout my career in the media
business
i’ve always been very careful not to be
tabloid fodder
i’ve always been careful not to put a
foot wrong and not be part of the smut
and sensationalism that often drives
the stories that we see in the
pertaining to personalities
in this country and i spent a very long
time trying to avoid
controversy but now i realize that all i
was doing
was making it camp right outside my door
i was making it camp right there day
after day
month after month year after year
what it’s made me realize is that
there are times when we also create
tension
the fact that that which we resist
grows and we inadvertently create
tension
and unintentionally create this monster
and this very controversy that i’d been
avoiding
struck me when it did with the
app with absolute ferocity and it struck
me at my most personal
and my most precious one of my children
and so i’ve learned in life that just go
don’t fight too hard some things
you don’t have to resist because it
doesn’t mean they’re not going to happen
just because you resisted
resist them does not mean they’re not
going to happen and if they do happen so
what
you will deal with them anyway you will
deal with them
so those are the three lessons ladies
and gentlemen but i also want to leave
you with my plus one
and my plus one is that cyber bullying
is devastating it degrades
it humiliates and it slanders
don’t be a part of it because your post
and your words
could be the act that causes someone and
leads
someone to an act of self-harm thank you