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Are your teens texting these sayings? What parents should know

Your teenager may be using a secret language on their smartphone to chat with other teens and even strangers, and some of these code words are sexual in nature.

Cracking this code of sexting acronyms may be difficult for some parents.

Matthew Solomone, a father to a 16 year old girl and a 13-year old boy, was asked to decipher “53 X” and “GNOC” and he said he’d never heard of either. He said he keeps his kids off of social media in hopes of preventing sordid interactions.

"No Instagram in the house, no Snapchat in the house, there's no Facebook in the house," said Solomone in an interview with our sister station WJAX-TV in Jacksonville. "That's the easy way to do it."

One in four teens have received sexts and one in seven has sent them, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“A lot of parents don’t know their kids have “Finstas”-- fake instagrams, or multiple Snapchat accounts they use,” said Stacy Pendarvis, program director of the Monique Burr foundation for Children. “Kids are way more savvy than we are with technology. When we figure it out, they change the game on us.”

Pendarvis said you can level the playing field with apps like Bark. It lets parents monitor their child’s texts, emails, social media posts, and private messages.

Pendarvis said it’s important to sit down with your child and tell them why it isn’t an attack on their privacy, but about their safety.

“With a phone, you are giving access to so many that dangers that could end up deadly,” Pendarvis said.

Here are just a few of the new acronyms teens are using in text messages that parents should be aware of:

  • 53 X = sex
  • GNOC =get naked on camera
  • WTTP=want to trade pictures?
  • LMIRL= let's meet in real life
  • KPC =keeping parents clueless

“We haven’t come across any acronyms and hopefully never will,” said Salamone.

Teenage sexting also is illegal and may lead to jail time or a sex offender designation.

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