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Her son came out. She called a gay bar for advice. The delightful conversation went viral.

Parenting done right.

Photo courtesy of Kara Coley.


Kara Coley, a bartender at Sipps in Gulfport, Mississippi, got an unusual phone call on the job last week.

"Good evening," Coley answered. "Thank you for calling Sipps!"

A woman on the other end of the line asked, "Is this a gay bar?"

Sipps welcomes everyone, Coley explained to her, but indeed attracts a mostly LGBTQ crowd.




"Can I ask you a question?" the caller followed up. "Are you gay?"

"Yes, ma'am," Coley said.

Then things got interesting.

"What was the one thing you wanted from your parents when you came out?" the woman continued.

Coley, who's tended bar for about 17 years, was a little caught off guard. In all her years of experience fielding requests and helping others working in the service industry, she'd never received a question like that.

Photo courtesy of Kara Coley.

"My son just came out to me," the woman continued on the other end of the line. "And I don't want to say anything that may mess him up in the head."

Coley thought for a moment. Then she asked the woman if she accepted her son for who he is.

The woman answered "yes."

"You should definitely let him know that you love and accept him!" Coley said. "I think everything will be OK from there!"

The woman thanked Coley for her input and they parted ways.

Later that night, in the early hours of Jan. 19, Coley decided to post the entire interaction to her Facebook page, noting how "random" it all had been.

In the days following, her post went viral, amassing over 1,500 likes and hundreds of shares.

So I got the most random phone call at the bar tonight! 😀Me:Good evening Thankyou for calling Sipps!Lady on phone: Is...
Posted by Kara Coley on Friday, January 19, 2018

The post's comment section soon filled with love and gratitude for Coley's simple but endearing answer.

"My heart is truly touched by this," one Facebook user wrote. "A parent wanting to support correctly, and a beautiful response. This is progress. This is love and acceptance in the rawest form."

"Kara, this old granny lesbian is so grateful for you, and for a parent that thought outside the box to get advice!" another user chimed in. "Keep being you!"

"[The response] has been amazing," Coley writes. She believes her post struck a chord with friends and strangers alike because people are looking for encouraging news: "Every day people wake up and there's so much negativity in the world — people just need a breath of fresh air!"

For parents to an LGBTQ child, it's still vital to understand the facts too, Coley noted: "Educate yourself [on LGBTQ issues] and do a little research."

Ideally, parents should have access to better resources than their local gay bar when it comes to getting help with LGBTQ parenting. At the end of the day, though, the best thing you can do as a parent is make sure your kid understands you're there through thick and thin.

"Just knowing you have someone in your corner takes a little weight off your shoulders," Coley wrote.

Learn more about being a good ally as a parent of an LGBTQ child at PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). If you're a young LGBTQ person who needs help, resources are available at The Trevor Project.


This article originally appeared on 1.24.18

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Teen son wins mom's $1,800 bet he couldn't stay off social media for 6 years

via Aranami/Flickr and Unsplash

The "18 for 18 challenge."

There is a lot of research that needs to be done on the effect that social media has on adolescents but the early studies suggest some reason for concern. The University of Columbia says that the more time teens spend on social media, the more likely they will experience mental health symptoms like anxiety, isolation and hopelessness.

Teens who can’t help but compare themselves to others are bound to have a difficult time with their self-image after spending hours a day scrolling through a world that’s predicated on likes, followers and comments.

Social media also makes it easy for teens to minimize their face-to-face contact with others. This can exacerbate feelings of alienation and hopelessness in those who suffer from social anxiety and depression.

via Pexels

One of the most disturbing studies out of BYU has found a correlation between time spent on social media and suicidality risk among teenage girls.

Lorna Klefsaas’ daughter had a tough time with Snapchat in her teens. "She got so obsessed with keeping up her Snapchat streaks that it was really affecting her mood. It was affecting her friendships,” the Minnesota mom told WUSA9.

The daughter is in grad school now and doing great with her social life, but Klefsaas hadn’t forgotten about her daughter's troubles when her younger son, Sivert, turned 12. She wanted to do whatever she could to keep him off social media, so she made him a bet. If he could stay off until he was 18, she would pay him $1,800. She called it the “18 for 18 challenge.”

"Being 12, I didn't really have that great of a concept of money yet. So, I was like oh sick, yeah, absolutely,” Sivert told WUSA9.

The student-athlete took on the challenge just like it was football or basketball. "He did really dig in. He was like ‘I'm not breaking this.’ I'm proud of him, because there were a few times where it was harder,” Klefsaas said.

"I knew for sure he was going to make it,” she added.

Klefsaas came up with the idea after hearing about another mother who issued a “16 for 16'' challenge to her daughter. She beefed up the deal by two years to hopefully carry her son into adulthood.

And it did.

Recently, when Sivert turned 18, he collected $1,800 from his family for being able to abstain from social media for six years. He celebrated the occasion by opening up an Instagram account, but he has a lot of catching up to do.

"It's hilarious. I feel like I'm like 80. I can't seem to figure out social media. It's pretty embarrassing. I'll be with my friends, and they are like, 'what are you doing?'" Sivert laughed.

Sivert is happy he took on the challenge and won because it allowed him to spend more time focusing on his academics and sports. "On the whole, I would say totally worth it. I mean, I would do it again,” Sivert says. He’s currently sifting through offers from colleges to play football next year.

Looking to help your kids develop healthy social media habits? Anne Marie Albano, Ph.D., director of the Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders, said that it's best to set time aside every day where the phones are always off.

“Mealtimes are a great time to put the phones away. Another healthy habit is to set a time each night when you’ll put all the screens away to give yourself enough time to wind down and prepare the body for sleep,” she told Columbia University.

She also says that you can improve a child’s social media habits by implementing the “grandma's rule” we all abided by as kids. You’ve got to eat your veggies before you have dessert. First, kids have to exercise and do their homework before they earn their social media time.

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Culture

John Mayer had a wonderful response to a Taylor Swift fan who wished him dead

via Wikimedia Commons and Wikimedia Commons

John Mayer and Tayloe Swift

Taylor Swift gave a tour de force performance on "Saturday Night Live" this weekend of a 10-minute version of "All Too Well," which is believed to be about Jake Gyllenhaal.

The performance was to promote her new album "Red (Taylor's Version)" which is a re-recording of her classic 2012 CD. Swift is in the process of re-recording every album she made before 2019 to reclaim the rights to her music. Her older recordings are owned by Shamrock Holdings, which gets paid whenever someone streams or buys the songs.

Swift hopes that fans will opt to listen to the new versions that she owns over the older ones.

For Swift's loyal fans, known as Swifties, the "SNL" performance brought the Gyllenhaal break-up back to the forefront and some, sensing a trend, took the opportunity to address another ex, musician John Mayer.

Swift eviscerated Mayer on the song "Dear John" which appeared on her 2010 album "Red." Here's an excerpt of the lyrics:

My mother accused me of losing my mind,

But I swore I was fine, you paint me a blue sky

And go back and turn it to rain

And I lived in your chess game,

But you changed the rules every day

Wondering which version of you I might get on the phone

Tonight, well I stopped picking up, and this song is to let you know why

Dear John, I see it all now that you're gone

Don't you think I was too young to be messed with?

The girl in the dress, cried the whole way home, I should've known

One Swiftie, who goes by the name @hoeforlouaylor on TikTok, wrote an extremely mean message to Mayer on Instagram.

"Fuck yourself you ugly bitch I hope you choke on something," @hoeforlouaylor wrote. She then demanded a response adding, "answer me you bitch." To her surprise, the "Your Body Is a Wonderland" singer gave a very polite response.

Hi Alondrea, It's John. I've been getting so many messages like this the past couple of days, I decided to choose your message at random to reply to. You can feel free to screen shot, share in any way you like if you want. I'm not upset, I just tend to have a curious mind and feel compelled to ask. Do you really hope that I die?

After Mayer responded, she posted an image of the conversation on TikTok.

via @hoeforlouaylor / TikTok

The TikTok user sent a follow-up video where she said she apologized to Mayer. The video has since been set to private.

"My friend literally dared me to do that," she said in the recording, according to The Daily Dot. "She's a Taylor fan and like so am I. It was a dare. I'm sorry. I did not expect you to see."

Mayer responded by showing that he's a human being with feelings, too. "So it's a fun thing people are doing without taking into account that I might see it and be affected by it?" he asked.

The TikTok user reiterated that she didn't think he'd read the message. Then, in a wonderful display of grace, Mayer told the woman who wished him dead that it was fine by him.

"It's 100 percent okay," Mayer told her. "Go forth and live happy and healthy!"

Mayer did a great job in taking the high road with the Swiftie by explaining that even though he's a famous musician, he's just like everyone else. One of the worst things about internet culture is the idea that there aren't any real people behind the profiles on social media.

If more people saw the humanity in those they are speaking with online it would go a long way toward softening our national discourse. Mayer did a nice job by pointing that out.

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Most Shared

One little girl took pictures of her school lunches. The Internet responded — and so did the school.

If you listened to traditional news media (and sometimes social media), you'd begin to think the Internet and technology are bad for kids. Or kids are bad for technology. Here's a fascinating alternative idea.

True
Norton

This article originally appeared on 03.31.15

Kids can innovate, create, and imagine in ways that are fresh and inspiring — when we "allow" them to do so, anyway. Despite the tendency for parents to freak out because their kids are spending more and more time with technology in schools, and the tendency for schools themselves to set extremely restrictive limits on the usage of such technology, there's a solid argument for letting them be free to imagine and then make it happen.

It's not a stretch to say the kids in this video are on the cutting edge. Some of the results he talks about in the video at the bottom are quite impressive.

If you can't or don't want to watch the clip, here's the quick version:

Many people think the Internet and technology are scary places for kids. But did you know about ...

Martha, who is from Scotland.

She took pictures of her school's lunches every day.

It reached a point where Jamie Oliver took notice and tweeted his support.

The school told her to stop, but after all of the press, instead they did the right thing and made changes to the lunch program. Yay, Martha! And she raised $200,000 for the food insecure.

(Yes, that's Mr. Bean in frame 4.)

There's Josh, who is in middle school in Iowa.

He decided to narrate Pokemon walk-through videos.

He's so good at that, he walked into college with a six-figure income from the ad revenue of those videos(!!).

There's Tavi, who created an online magazine called "Rookie" with her friends.

It has a huge following and has reached far into teen culture.

John created an app at age 15.

He sold it to Yahoo at age 17 for $30 million. Can you imagine?

Lauren decided to send a Hello Kitty doll 93,000 feet into space, and record it.

And she did just that.


And there's a group of teens on the Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota.

An ABC News special portrayed their lives as pretty much based on drugs and crime. They made a video to show who they really were: kids with passion, humility, self-respect, love, creativity, and family.


All of these are kids are creating and innovating — but not in school. Rather, at home.

Schools are far too restrictive to allow kids to do things like these kids did, and that needs to change.

The final quote says it all for me. "Get out of their way and let them be amazing!"

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