I think we paid $150/mo when it was just my wife and I with two cars. It’s $390/mo after adding a young driver and another car.
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Soon to be 14 year old finally has a cell phone, and, man…. It’s locked down, no social media, time limits on games, can’t text friends during certain hours.
I install Duolingo for her (not putting a time limit on) and she’s addicted. Literally was doing like 40 lessons a day. Which on the one hand is cool - working on a foreign language. But also tells me how quickly she can become addicted to these things. Time limit now on.
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That’s very interesting. If I could go back in time, I’d consider banning everything except Duolingo and/or all social media has to be in another language. As it happened, we never really, or at least successfully banned anything beyond “not until you finish your homework”* and the kids probably are less addicted to screen time now than their parents, but that’s not saying much.
*I think around 13 was peak difficulty in this regard.
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For screen time we relied on technology solutions. Apple parental controls and something called Circle on our router that limited hours of use. Limiting access to specific content seemed like such an unwinnable battle we barely even tried.
Our biggest problem was that for our first kid the dumb school had things so that they had to have an iPad to do a lot of their assignments and they imagined they could do something on the devices to block kids from using them as they wanted. That worked out very badly and they had already stopped doing it when our second kid, three grades behind, came through middle school.
Mostly I think it’s all unwinnable and if you blocked something and they didn’t circumvent it or do it on other devices it’s because they didn’t really want to. That’s probably good enough if it’s stuff that they don’t really seek out, but you are keeping them from accidentally seeing. As far as I was ever aware my kids were never finding the disturbing stuff and the only thing I was at all lecturing about was that they can’t trust that people are what they seem and they can’t get too friendly with internet strangers.
Btw, see you Sunday!
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This month marks my youngest son’s 17th birthday. Im not and never have been one to lament the passing of time. I don’t fear aging or death, yet im struggling a bit here. Its possibly due to my current three month long depression bout, but as he is a year from legal adulthood and the likely beginning of our empty nest, I find myself looking back and wondering if Ive done enough.
I am not a cats in the cradle workaholic type, but the majority of his growth years was spent barely squeaking by monetarily. A lot of years spent living paycheck to paycheck. Short selling an underwater house and eventually living his 4th-12th grade years in rental housing. Does he feel like any place was ever really his home? Did I fuck him over by not having that stability? Due to the paycheck to paycheck nature of our existence, vacations were few and far between. Will he look back on the time we spent together with fondness or will he lament feeling like we never did enough together? DID we do enough together? Did the stresses of life, work, money, relationships, anger at the state of the world, cause me to withdraw too often and end up hurting our relationship? He was 8 when DT was first elected, and Ive had so much anger at the world since that point that I cant imagine that he has been able to live in my orbit and not pick up on that which seethes beneath the surface.
I mentioned above I dont fear death, and thats true, but I do fear dying alone. If its an accident or sudden, all the better, but I type with tears in my eyes thinking of one day lying in a bed, slowly dying, with my sons unable or unwilling to come see me off. Its why I “joke” about suicide if I ever become terminal or dimential.
I hope when I die I can look back and think I did an ok job. Both of my kids always had a roof, always had food, and always had love. They were never hit or screamed at or told they were lesser than anyone else. I like to think I imparted as much (or as little) wisdom as I have available to help guide their lives to be as good as they possibly can be.
I hope so, man.
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This is all that matters man.
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Not to trivilialize what you’re thinking, but if rental housing and not enough vacations are what comes to mind as concerning you, then I think you did a pretty darn good job.
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I honestly feel like struggling with money made me a better parent. I may have bought and sold properties at the wrong time and made some bad career and business decisions, but at least I wasn’t going to be a complete failure.
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I both get and appreciate this. Im also cognizant enough to understand that a lot of what Im feeling is my unchecked depression right now. Doing my first ever psych intake appointment today actually, so, thats a positive. Just kinda hit me today as his bday approaches.
Thanks for letting me vent, all.
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And after years of having a negative net worth I am quite recently back in black. So it’s all good.
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Attaboy
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My 10 year old niece has an iPad and got an iPhone for her birthday and that poor child’s brain is absolutely cooked from unsupervised YouTube.
My 4 month old recently noticed the TV and has started twisting himself during tummy time to try to watch so I have that challenge ahead.
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I didn’t have the best relationship with my single mother who raised me alone since I was 12 years old, but I have a good relationship with her now.
I don’t look back on my childhood with anger and resentment and think about all the bad things that happened, and only have great respect for her as a person and mother for all the things she did for me.
Some of the “best” parents I knew growing up have almost no relationship with their adult children, while I continue to see my mom 1-2x a week.
So I’d say continue to try and have a good relationship with your children because being a parent and friend to your child never stops, and they’ll remember the good times growing up with you and forget about the bad.
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You’re a bigger man than me if you’ve never screamed at your kids (depending on what you mean by scream I guess).
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Oh, there has been raising of voices, but Ive really tried to keep that to the barest of minimums. Like, I saw some intense examples of this when I was a kid at another kid’s house and hoo boy I can just never imagine treating my kid like that.
Heres an example, my son got his license recently, and pulling into our garage is not the easiest feat, so I showed him how I do it, sat with him while he tried and instructed him how I do it to prevent things like pulling in too tight. First time he takes the car he does just fine. Second time, im washing dishes, hear the garage door open and then REEEEEEEESSSSHHHHH. Ya know, thr unmistakeable sound of metal scraping on stucko.
I leap out and hes stopped and of course he had come in too tight and scraped the whole back half of the car.
“DUDE! Out! Now!”
Hes feeling bad obviously, but I say “Look, Im obviously pissed right now, let me park this right and look at the car and let me cool down and then we’ll talk.”
Afterward, I showed him the damage (superficial but annoying, but we are never selling this thing for anything but peanuts so whatever.) I asked him what his thought process was and what he thought he did wrong, and then I showed him again how I park the car, some additonal alternatives and reminded him, if you are ever in doubt, stop, back up, and try again.
Anyway, the “Dude, stop out!” Is no doubt yelling at him, but I compare it to when my friend got in his first accident when we were teens. His dad showed up and just dressed him down for multiple minutes. Asking him what kind of dumbass he is, how he can be so stupid, what the fuck was he thinking, how he is going to work his ass off to pay it off, etc. That to me is screaming at them. Doing your best to break somebody down by raising your voice and making them look and feel small. I never wanted to do that to my kids.
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This spoke to me - I’ve honestly never yelled at the kid, I don’t raise my voice at all, really in anything.
BUT - I do use “extremely serious voice” which is probably hyper monotone and what a serial killer sounds like. And I’m certain it absolutely feels to her like I’m talking down to her, and she’s aware that I’m doing it instead of yelling. She’s told me before that it’s scary, and it often brings her to tears, where my wife can yell at her (not often!) and she’ll just yell back. Your comment of it making her look and feel small, I think is a bullseye for us.
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And man, I get it. Kids do stupid shit that makes us want to tear our hair out, or make them feel like what they did was fucking stupid because it was.
I always always always try to put myself into the position of. “Hey, you did some REALLY stupid shit when you were that age, remember. And this kid is half you, so really its at least 50%, your fault anyway.” Tends to take some of the edge off. I busted the front end of my first car by coming in too hot to a curb, jumping it, and hitting a light pole. Like, yeah, I was fucking dumb. Of course my spawn will be fucking dumb.
Youre doing fine. At least she is open enough and close enough to you to let you know she doesnt like that. We all have shit we can work on to do better.
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If you want you can tell him I did the same thing with my new car less than 2 payments in so if he keeps that up he’s got me as a future to look forward to.
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