Lost in Translation

Before I had kids, I had a lot of ideas about parenting.  I’m sure that is true for the entire bachelor/ette population.  They go to a restaurant and sneer at the unruly children.  They shake their heads, in fake sympathy, at the exhausted parent, who could be either 25 or 55 (the bags under the eyes make it hard to tell) and think “When I have kids…” and that’s where they should stop.  It’s certainly where I should have stopped.  Because until you’re in that moment, you just don’t know.  I had a conversation with a kid-less friend of mine who asked why I didn’t have my kids doing more crafts instead of watching TV on Saturday mornings, and I wanted to say one word in response “survival.”  But I just smiled and said, instead, “That’s a great idea” and walked away.  She’ll understand down the road.  The word survival will take on a whole new meaning. 

Before kids, my husband and I talked about TV.  We said, with great conviction, “Two shows a day.”  But the reality is this: my kids wake up at 5:30.  I have to get to work by 7:20 (the first Sophomores saunter into my room at 7:10, and school starts at 7:25), which means I have to make lunch for both kids, get them dressed, sun-screened, Abby’s hair brushed, and all appropriate needs for the day packed into bags, make coffee for myself and have a breakfast bar, all before 6:50.  My kids watch TV from 5:30 until my husband takes them to pre-school/day care at 7:30.  Yup.  Then they learn and play all day, and when I pick them up, we play for a bit, and then they eat dinner…in front of the TV.  I tell myself it’s okay because the shows they watch are relatively educational (at least according to the ads on the channel), filled with social skills and early literacy!  But really, I am just trying to survive.  And I worry.  Not so much for right now, but for the future.  Are my kids going to move from the TV to the iPad to the cell phone?  Are my kids going to rely on technology the way my high schoolers do?  Because texts, tweets and snapchats seem to be their life-blood.  They can’t make it through a test without checking their phone.  I can truly say that for many of them the cell phone is an addiction and it worries me.  Because maybe, it started with TV.

Maybe, it was TV, then phones and the Internet.  Maybe these kids are no different than the two 12-year old girls who, after spending hours on a horror site on the web, decided to stab their friend in the woods leaving her to crawl to safety.    And how do I know that my peanut of a daughter, with her big brown curious eyes looking at that TV through her neon pink glasses, won’t turn into those girls? How do I know my blondie of a boy, who gallops through life heedless and carefree, won’t bring a knife to school one day when a girl rejects his advances?

The scary thing is, I don’t know.  But here’s what I hope.

I hope I remember that I am their translator.  I hope that for the time being, while I am in control of what they watch, I can help them to make sense of the messages strewn at them.  And when I am no longer in control (scary as that may be), I hope they will come to me with their confusion. 

For now, when dinner is over, we play together.  We do puzzles and read books, and build, and knock down Lego towers, and all the time we talk.  And maybe that’s what these young people who are killing other young people didn’t have.  Maybe these kids had no one to translate all of the messages they were receiving from the TV, their phones and the web.  Maybe those 12-year old girls just needed a parent or a teacher or ANY adult to see and hear what they were seeing and hearing, and to help them to understand and make sense of it. 

So, let’s make this pact:  I, as a caregiver (parent, teacher, guardian, random adult in the room), will watch and listen.  I will advise when I can, explain what I’ve learned, and learn what I need to.  Because too many kids are hurting too many other kids, and I don’t know how to translate that.