Considering Going Luddite: Kids, Social Mayhem and Me

My son's favorite country is China.

His favorite number is 11.

Color? Food? Subject in school?

I could tell you all those things -- but only because, with the assistance of his big sister, my six year old made a quiz I could take on-line.

I took it.

Turns out, thanks to that dumb quiz, I know the GFYO not as well as I thought. I know the child I bred and birthed and who owes me who sleeps in my bed most nights, something like 66% which doesn't even put me in the so-called category of "peeps who know me good" -- which is absurd because the freaking dog does not count as a "brother" and also: CHINA?

This is why I hate technology. Technology is getting in the way of my role as the undefeated know-it-all of All Knowledge. Which, as many of you know, is the right of all mothers.

Damn you internet! Damn you quizzes with trick questions!

6th grader B does not have a mobile phone yet but she does have an email account -- which I realize seems only normal in some alternate universe of "normal." I hold the phone off like a freaking golden carrot but allow her access now to conversations online with friends (I approve) who lead us to these stupid quizzes. I allow her to talk one way and not the other? It doesn't even make sense to me.

I had Shaun Cassidy posters on my wall (like her Bieber ones) and when my parents signed up for "total phone," which was built (I think) for dads at the train station to get past the busy signal, me and my friends figured out how to game it and "group chatted" like -- well, like tween and teenage girls did then and -- do now.

Truth is, not much has changed.

Truth is, I have no idea what I am doing.

I'm weighing my friends experiences (especially those with older kids), but mostly, I'm winging it. There has not been a time when I have felt so utterly out on my own in parenting. Where's the book for this?

Soon enough, the day will come where the questions on the quiz will neither be as simple or as funny as my son's were. Soon enough, my sixth grader won't even want my answers. She'll probably want to text her BFF.

(This makes me want to deny her a phone FOREVER and delete her email account right this very second. Which I could but won't.)

At some point, most kids sneak away from our grip and become who they will be; it's part of the process. But right now, while I have 'em in my hands -- I run their social and their media.

But I also know the future is coming in more ways than one.

Will my withholding of a mobile phone, my monitoring of internet access, my insistence that phone calls be made where I can (mostly) hear them even matter?

I have no idea. Do you?