I am raising three outstanding sons: two teenagers and one little guy. When they’re little guys it’s so much easier to keep tabs on their day-to-day interactions. When they become preteens, especially with their own phones in their hands, it’s easy for them to slide down a path strewn with potential detours, downed trees, and potholes. It’s a mom’s job–and dad’s, but mom’s seem to be more emotionally pulsed by their kids’ wrong turns–to help her sons right their course.
One such opportunity came my way this week. My 15-year-old seems to have found love after a two-month-old introduction. I asked my husband, exasperated, how do you know you’ve fallen in love after two months of knowing someone? Husband shrugs his shoulders. So maybe he gets the rush of adoration and emotion in that scenario? Maybe it’s not unusual; maybe it’s just me recognizing my oldest growing up right before my eyes, without me really seeing it happen.
Love scenario, coupled with ongoing phone obsessions that have their devices seemingly Super-Glued to their hands until, sometimes, the wee small hours of the morning, made me realize, things had gotten far afield. You hear the reports about teens and their phones and placing restrictions on your kids’ usage. Naively, I/we assumed, “Not our boys.” But in the back of my mind, while uttering the words, the gnawing notion that I was in fact, being naïve, putting my head in the sand because I didn’t want to believe my kids were veering off-course following influencers of ill repute. (That just sounded so “my-parents” or at least like someone from their Baby Boomer generation, it was kind of hard to reread; but it doesn’t make the sentiment any less true an opinion.)
With an in-depth, deep dive into apps on their phones, exploring exactly who and what they’re following, I was blown away by the stuff that entertained and amused both my 15-year-old and 13-year-old. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around how they had allowed themselves to be exposed to some of the most basic, raw, non-self-respecting crap that lives online and is accessed through apps. Knowing that any entity you follow has free access to you and can shoot you any and all forms of inappropriate content, in any way, they deem okay, became a head scratcher.
Course correction was a must, for both of my teenage boys. It’s common knowledge that knowing what your kids are up to is a parental priority of the highest order. That must include their phones… their phones are their social lifeline and their information gatherers. Their personal GPS is intertwined with their devices. Knowing where my sons are on the road to maturity and adulthood is my most important job. When U-turns are required to steer back toward home, helping to center them on that which they are being raised–values important to our family unit–consider me the cop who stops you for speeding, and swerving over the line. “License and registration, please. Do you know how fast you were going? You were also crossing lanes with no turn signal.”
Suspending the license is your call…
Copyright © 2019 María Felicia Kelley