Text what?

I am amazed by the number of parents who are hands-off and let their kids (especially teens!) have basically no limits when it comes to social media, texting and playing rated "M" ("M" means mature and is appropriate for ages 17+) video games.

I trust my kids but I am cautious of their peers.  It makes me nervous that no one seems to be aware of what they are doing, or the type of video games they are playing. So many of these games are full of shooting, realistic violence, and war type scenarios. There was one game Ian asked if he could get that had dead female corpses.  And you had to examine the corpse to figure out what happened.  I should be okay with this because as the reviews said, the dead NAKED corpse wasn't onscreen for very long and I believe there was only one of them.  Um, what???  Yeah, that's not happening in my house.  Not at age 13, 14, 15 or 16.  Just reading the description of this game freaked me out.  

Don't even get me started on the texting.  OMG!  Ian is a part of many group texting threads.  These conversations just keep going and going and going.  I monitor Ian's electronic communication.  I think it is important to make sure everything is on the up and up.  To be honest, I am breaking myself in with Ian on how vigilant I want to be because it's Samantha I am truly worried about.  She is still a few years away from getting a phone and most likely having many friends to text with.  Even so, I am super glad I do check Ian's texts.  There was this one group chat that made me feel ill; completely nauseas on what I read being a texted by a friend.  It was vile and disgusting and very much out of line.  There was no reason for it and these horrid texts appear out-of-left-field and make zero sense to the ongoing conversation.  I was particularly pleased that the other kids in the group text either told him "NO / Stop!", ignored him completely or tried to reason with him why it wasn't appropriate.  It pained me to know my son was even seeing this obscene messages.  I took the appropriate measures to make sure this child stopped and hopefully even get mental help for voicing such thoughts, but here's the thing I am most stumped about....why was I the only parental type figure to see this???   With up to 20 others in the text thread, I am the only one to notice the vulgarity?  Really?   I just don't get it.  Are all these parents' heads buried in the sand?  Are they in denial that any harm could come from this?  I hope not.  But its appearing that way to me.