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I've often thought that bringing up kids was the ultimate opportunity for the exercise of simple common sense. So much of what is wrong with kids (especially other people's kids, you understand) comes down to the feckless stupidity and lack of discipline of their parents; surely all you have to do is play the game straight and everything will come out right. Right?
Well, it's now time for Bison Daughter's twelfth birthday, and the thing she wants most is a phone. Not really to talk to anyone, just for the texting. All her friends have phones, and they sit there on the school bus, texting each other. There's absolutely no point to it, of course. They have nothing to say, and I cannot see the point in expending $150 on a phone and a further $20-40 a month on a plan simply so that Bison Daughter can recede into a sad world of "CU L8R" or whatever meaningless drivel it is that passes between preteen girls as an alternative to actual conversation.
It's a no-brainer really. I mean, I didn't get a mobile phone until I got a sales job at the age of twenty four, and that was a car phone which had some apparatus the size of a four-slot toaster in the trunk, so it wasn't really "mobile" in that sense. Since when did it become an imperative that all our offspring have a mobile phone? Since phone companies figured out that they could sell them ringtones, wallpaper and no end of expensive and worthless downloads, that's when.
The problem is that, shite and worthless though the phone-text traffic is, that's the only means of communication kids seem to have now. They don't talk to each other - I don't believe most of them could hold a conversation if their phone depended on it - so if you're not part of the texting network then you're likely an outcast. No parent wants their kid to be left out; teenage girls have cruelty and exclusion down to an art form - I think it gives them something to do in between pulling the wings off insects and torturing small mammals - and being different is just an invitation to exclusion.
So much as I relish the thought of knocking down the "all my friends have one" argument with some tried and tested parental reasoning like "well, if all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?" I know that at some point, eventually, I'm going to break down and get my kid a phone too. Which is a sad indictment of the society in which we live, isn't it? Parents go off to work, and spend way too many hours there, trying to make enough money to pay all the bills, including the mobile phone, while their kids sit around like little vegetables, only able to communicate at all by typing partial words and sub-sentences into their little reality-avoidance machines.
If we hadn't persuaded ourselves that we needed all this shit in the first place we could work less and spend more time with the people we purported to love. Applying the simple principles of common sense to raising them, so they didn't grow up to be dysfunctional freaks with social alienation disorders and an inability to relate to other humans, or cope with delayed gratification. Yeah right. LOL to that.
Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison
Well, it's now time for Bison Daughter's twelfth birthday, and the thing she wants most is a phone. Not really to talk to anyone, just for the texting. All her friends have phones, and they sit there on the school bus, texting each other. There's absolutely no point to it, of course. They have nothing to say, and I cannot see the point in expending $150 on a phone and a further $20-40 a month on a plan simply so that Bison Daughter can recede into a sad world of "CU L8R" or whatever meaningless drivel it is that passes between preteen girls as an alternative to actual conversation.
It's a no-brainer really. I mean, I didn't get a mobile phone until I got a sales job at the age of twenty four, and that was a car phone which had some apparatus the size of a four-slot toaster in the trunk, so it wasn't really "mobile" in that sense. Since when did it become an imperative that all our offspring have a mobile phone? Since phone companies figured out that they could sell them ringtones, wallpaper and no end of expensive and worthless downloads, that's when.
The problem is that, shite and worthless though the phone-text traffic is, that's the only means of communication kids seem to have now. They don't talk to each other - I don't believe most of them could hold a conversation if their phone depended on it - so if you're not part of the texting network then you're likely an outcast. No parent wants their kid to be left out; teenage girls have cruelty and exclusion down to an art form - I think it gives them something to do in between pulling the wings off insects and torturing small mammals - and being different is just an invitation to exclusion.
So much as I relish the thought of knocking down the "all my friends have one" argument with some tried and tested parental reasoning like "well, if all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?" I know that at some point, eventually, I'm going to break down and get my kid a phone too. Which is a sad indictment of the society in which we live, isn't it? Parents go off to work, and spend way too many hours there, trying to make enough money to pay all the bills, including the mobile phone, while their kids sit around like little vegetables, only able to communicate at all by typing partial words and sub-sentences into their little reality-avoidance machines.
If we hadn't persuaded ourselves that we needed all this shit in the first place we could work less and spend more time with the people we purported to love. Applying the simple principles of common sense to raising them, so they didn't grow up to be dysfunctional freaks with social alienation disorders and an inability to relate to other humans, or cope with delayed gratification. Yeah right. LOL to that.
Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison
posted by Mr Bison at
1:24 PM
3 Comments:
Loving the sweeping generalizations there.
And phones are so last week, its all about Facebook now.
Just don't forget to get the limitless text package!
If it makes you feel any better I got to the point where I'm quite happy about texting. Crazy? Like a fox I am. I am able to be in contact with my son from anywhere at anytime. As long as they're texting, they don't care who it is, and none of their friends have to know it's their mom or dad.
You can text your daughter to say hi from wherever you're working to pay for the phone!
Campbell,
I know, you're right. And getting random "I miss you, Dad" messages during the day would be a real bonus, especially while I'm traveling. Eventually I'll probably go to the dark side...
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