"It's just period blood"Would you show these explicit menstrual ads to prepare your daughter for her period?

10-year-old gets tattooSome parents are fine about inking their kids. How about you?

Parent24 : Teen 13-18 : development behaviour : Why teens love MXit

Why teens love MXit

Pin It

15-year-old James McLaren tells all about Mxit from a teen’s point of view.

By James McLaren

Article originally in Parent24

Almost all of the contact I have with my friends, besides in social gatherings, is on MXit. Many parents do not understand that when we are on MXit, we are not mindlessly passing time but having meaningful conversations.

Advantages of MXit

It’s accessible. MXit on my phone is the most accessible form of communication; You simply take out your phone from your pocket and log on.

It’s cheap. MXit is also the cheapest method of cellular communication, an SMS is 75c and a MXit message is a fraction of a cent.

You can talk to groups. I can talk to more people at once than with SMS. Mxit has a service called ‘multimix’, a ‘chatroom-like’ application. If I start a multimix, I add as many people into the ‘room’ as I want and we all have a group conversation.

I can only invite into the multimix people from my contact list, so that eliminates the chance of uninvited guests. So you can kill 15 birds with a 1c stone.

It’s international. Several of my MXit contacts live in countries like Australia, New Zealand and even America. MXit even provides Facebook-like features. Now you can have a profile picture. I can also update a status on MXit.

Late nights with MXit

I, like most of my friends, use MXit in the evening to avoid the ‘Are you on MXit again?’ comments from my parents. This routine happens night after night. 9 o’clock: ‘goodnight Mum, Dad.’

Lights out. Phone on. Under the covers. Connecting . . . Logging on. Then it’s social time for +/- 4 hours.

With school, sport, and other extra murals staying up so late just for socializing is not a good idea. Most of us constantly complain about tiredness but avoid blaming MXit – we use school work as a scapegoat. If you are staying up till 1am chatting with a friend, sure enough, the next day he/she will have a complaint as to the amount of work we are expected to do.

MXit can be used during the day time and the same numbers of people are online in the day time, but our parents present the main obstacle. I think that if parents were a little more indulgent and a little less scathing of their teens MXiting then we would not be driven to 'under-the-covers' secrecy.

MXit is communication, not mindless entertainment.

Do you think parents are too quick to criticise what they don’t understand?