A Week With Phones

All four of my kids have now had phones for a week. It’s been a total game-changer. I mean that literally. They play a whole different slate of games now that they can access the mobile app store. Everything else is pretty much the same. One thing the new phones haven’t done is save their lives. To date, the kids have yet to send a single text message in an emergency situation, which is what I got the devices for in the first place. I suppose I should be grateful no life-threatening crises have arisen, although even if one did, I’m not sure my kids would use their phones as intended. Instead, they would likely spam us with giant thumbs up emojis. To most people, that would mean they like something a lot. To my kids, it means they’re holding their phone with a death grip and forgot to let up. I’m now realizing there’s a new kind of etiquette I have to teach my offspring. I’ve spent most of their lives training them (unsuccessfully) on how to behave in social situations to avoid faux pas and keep unexplained fires to a minimum. Now, I have to do the same, but for the digital arena. If they double text you or leave you on read, I assure you the slight is accidental. Give them time. Soon enough, it will be on purpose.

Photo by Adem AY on Unsplash

I don’t know the phones have made them any safer, but they’ve definitely improved my kids’ ability to tattle. My thirteen-year-old, Betsy, watches the other girls during the summer when my wife and I are away at work. They listen to her about as well as they listen to me and Lola. In other words, the house is in a state of chaos at all times. When that chaos becomes too chaos-y even for Betsy (think the Yellowstone super volcano instead of the regular Mount Saint Helen’s kind), she calls me. That’s nothing new. She’s had her phone for over a year. What is novel is that, after she calls me to rat out her sisters, I can call them back individually to unleash various unenforceable threats from a distance. It sounds like a low stakes hostage situation. “If you don’t start picking up your room in the next five minutes, no TV after dinner!” If I was any good at this, I would demand unmarked bills and a helicopter. I always call Betsy back after the previously mentioned time interval to make sure the kid I threatened actually complied. Usually, they do. Apparently I’m scarier over the phone than I am in person. If I tried that same tactic when we were in a room together, the kid in question would just ignore me until I ended up grounding them from everything, which would be tragic. No one wants to take away their devices less than me. Screen time is quiet time. I’m only punishing myself.

I really can’t ground the kids from their phones, anyway. Besides needing them for emergencies, they have to have one for our family’s group chats. That’s right: We finally have one. Setting it up felt like a huge milestone. We now have an ongoing text conversation with the six of us. Barring some calamity, such as one of the kids dividing in half and self-replicating, it will be just the six of us for the rest of our lives. Yes, the kids might get married someday, but I’m not adding spouses to this group. They can be in the extended (a.k.a. not the real) family chat. The main one will always just be for family members related by blood. I want a one-stop-shop if I need to ask for a kidney.

Now that I think about it, the mere existence of the chat puts a lot of pressure on all of us. It’s going to be an ongoing record of our family’s trials and tribulations that can never be altered or destroyed. There will forever be copies of it on six separate devices, plus our cell phone provider’s copy that they send directly to the FBI. I’m sure the chat will be quoted verbatim at various therapy sessions for years to come. If I need the girls to do something, I can put the request/order in the group chat so they can all see it at once. Then it’s on the record and no one can claim the message wasn’t delivered. I don’t have to yell at the top of my lungs that it’s time for dinner. I can just text that message once and wait. Then, when one of the four kids doesn’t check their phone, I can yell anyway. In short, our house is exactly as loud as it was before, but now with the duplicate text version that I can check from time to time to verify that I really said what I thought I said and I’m not going crazy. As a parent, when I only say something once, it feels like I didn’t say it at all. I have to repeat it a million times in a row for it to count.

After those giant thumbs up emojis, the most common thing the kids share in our group chat is memes. The girls have been looking at those since well before they had phones. They used to pull them up on my desktop computer or watch them in YouTube videos on our various TVs. Half of those videos were just some millionaire twentysomething reading other people’s tweets. Sometimes, the kids would rush into the room to excitedly tell me that a famous YouTuber read one of my jokes. Then I would watch the video and marvel at the millions of views they got using my content. At least I’m cool enough to get ripped off by the big dogs. Whatever it takes to impress my kids.

Memes are a step even beyond that. They’ve been stolen and reshared so many times that there’s no way to tell who originally came up with them. Like sarcasm, it’s the lowest and laziest form of humor, but also the best. I have to admit I laugh at some of the stuff the kids share. It also scares me a little. At the age of thirty-seven, I’m about fifteen years behind on the internet pop culture knowledge I would need to understand half of this stuff. What’s the significance of a poorly drawn SpongeBob bending over like he’s doing the chicken dance? I don’t know, but I think it has something to do with global warming. When I was a kid, I never understood why my parents were so confused by the things I was into. Now, I totally relate to their bewilderment. Past a certain age, new things just make you angry. Now excuse me while I ask a nine-year-old to explain the Drake meme she just sent.

The new phones encourage communication in real life as well by giving my kids one more thing to fight over. That’s one outcome I genuinely didn’t see coming. Choruses of “Don’t touch my phone!” constantly echo through my house. They’re not even doing anything clever like pretending to be their sibling and texting that sibling’s friend to ruin their social life. They’re more likely to tap a sister’s screen to mess up the game she’s playing. If my kids merely kept their hands to themselves, it would solve ninety-nine percent of the problems in this house. Unfortunately, the only thing they believe in sharing is unwanted physical contact. Giving each kid their own phone did nothing to dampen their insatiable desire to touch in non-touching situations. Clearly, the only solution is to encase each kid in their own giant hamster ball. Unfortunately, that would just recreate the best challenge from American Gladiators. I don’t have time for that much fun in my life.

When the phones aren’t over-connecting my kids physically and electronically, they serve a vital secondary function: completely disconnecting them. Several months ago, I expanded my single membership to the gym to a family one so I could bring my kids with me. They thought it was awesome for a few weeks before completely abandoning me. That’s just the normal course of fatherhood. My job as a parent is to raise them to be ashamed of everything I stand for. After Waffle inherited Betsy’s old phone, however, she suddenly wanted to go to the gym with me. She didn’t want to exercise or even to play in the daycare area. She just wanted to sit in the bleachers by the basketball court and play games on her phone. I let her. She sat there quietly for the entire time I was in the weight room. The next day, she wanted to go with me again. I asked her why she didn’t just play on her phone at home. She said that, at the gym, no one was screaming or fighting. That’s right: An active basketball court was more peaceful than my house. Waffle, our agent of chaos, just needed some alone time. I will gladly take her with me to the gym every time she wants to go, even if she never gets the slightest bit of exercise. Bringing her with me helps her relax and makes the house we left behind more peaceful, too. These phones just might raise my kids yet.

In the inverse of that, the new devices are also doing a good job of connecting my kids to other family members. I had to manually go through Messenger Kids to pick which friends and relatives they could communicate with. If you made that list, I apologize. My kids immediately began spamming their contacts with all those memes I only sort of understand. To my great surprise, one of my sisters couldn’t get enough of it. In fact, she specifically asked for my wife and I to add her daughter to our kids’ contact list. My niece is home for the summer and desperately needed someone to amuse her so my sister could get some work done. That’s right: My kids are officially strategic distractions. They’re improving the nation’s productivity levels one triple text at a time.

That brings me to phone etiquette, which is the biggest area where my kids could use improvement after week one. I don’t really care if they spam me all day. I don’t value my time at home or anywhere else. If they don’t distract me, I’ll just have to do it myself. Lola, however, gets annoyed. She’s doing important sciencey things and doesn’t like to be interrupted by that meme of a little girl burning down a house. When you actually have little girls, it’s more of a threat than a joke. Waffle can’t type all that well, so her favorite way to communicate is by sending two-second voice messages. She can’t fit many words in such a short timespan, so she sends ten of them in a row. It will be a big day when she discovers she can hold down the button to speak in paragraphs. Until then, any time Waffle has the most minor of things to say, she’ll make my phone ding sixty-five times in a row. Usually, it’s just her asking me to remotely approve the download of some free game. If there’s ever actually an emergency like a fire, she probably won’t send me any messages at all. I bet she’ll take some pretty cool pictures of my house burning down, though. That was the real purpose of getting all the kids their own devices. I just needed four new sources of content for Instagram.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James