A few weeks ago, I received a text from another parent regarding my son.
Surprisingly, it was not a late Friday night knock on the door.
She told me that my son was driving 15 mph over the speed limit on the highway with her son in the car. She knew this from an app and suggested that I get the app too.
I decided not to.
When I confronted my son about his driving, he became upset.
His friend got a ride with him to the band concert because his parents didn’t want to attend. No one bothered to show up on his behalf. But they complained about my son’s driving.
My son said that if they have a problem with the way he drives, then maybe they should take their son and be involved in his life.
I don’t want my son to speed on the highway, but I have to agree with him. What good is constant nagging without being an involved parent??
I already have the app that tracks my children. I know where they are at all times.
I have the app that tracks their grades. I know about every missing assignment, every time they were a few minutes late to class, and every bad grade.
Every night could be a nag fest.
Did you turn in that assignment yet??
How is it going to make them responsible for their own lives if they constantly have mom and dad telling them what they need to do?? How can they think for themselves if we already have a solution for every problem??
Sometimes I think parenting was a lot easier when parents didn’t know so much.
I remember bringing my report cards home and the screaming and threatening only lasted a day or two. Sometimes I was even surprised by my grades.
I remember going to the library (where people smoked cigarettes) if I needed answers to questions. Shocking, I know. This comment should almost give my blog an R rating. The librarians had all the answers or knew where to find them, kind of like Siri.
I remember my parents saying that I had it made in my day because a bus picked us up for school. They had to walk uphill both ways to a one room schoolhouse that didn’t have indoor plumbing.
Every generation seems to think that the next generation has it so much easier. But is it really true with this generation?
When I was a kid, I spent my summers riding my bike around town from morning to night. Sometimes the chain fell off or I got a flat tire. Sometimes there was a storm.
I didn’t have a phone to call someone to pick me up. I had to solve my own problems.
I feel like some of that is missing in today’s world.
I wonder when we convinced ourselves that it wasn’t safe for our kids to ride their bikes around all day.
Parents worry about sexual predators, but somehow we convince ourselves that having our kids inside on the internet is safer than riding a bike around town.
To think we didn’t even wear helmets. That would be considered bad parenting today.
Now my kids can’t live without their phones. My daughter called me from her friend’s phone this morning saying that she forgot her phone at home and asked if I could bring it to school for her. I said ‘no’. I told her that I lived my first 18 years without a phone. I’m certain that she could survive for one day.
The kids of today have phone separation anxiety. They are bored or antsy when they have to be without the internet or their phones for more than a few minutes. They run up huge amounts of data on long car rides. They don’t know how to get anywhere because they never look out the window, yet they are lost without their phones.
What kind of life is that?
I think that my kids are wasting their young years watching everyone else live online. But yet they need to stay up to date on technology if they want to have a good career. We’re damned if we do. We’re damned if we don’t. We struggle with them and ourselves over limits.
We don’t know what to do. We can’t relate. We never had this. More often then not, we need our kids help to make technology work. It can be very frustrating.
There is such a huge technology gap between what I know and what my kids know. I would need them to set up the parental controls. Why bother? They are always 10 steps ahead of me. How can I adequately monitor them?
It will be interesting to see how the next generation of parents respond to these issues. I think it will be much easier for them since there won’t be as much of a technology gap between the generations.
Forget helicopter parenting! I feel like I am parenting from my horse and buggy. Meanwhile, my kids are driving the fast snazzy automobile of technology. I can never keep up.
For the first time in history, I think that our children are teaching us more than they are learning from us. This scares me..
Outrunning my demons 