“Dad, can I get SnapChat?” my daughter asks.
This is how the fight starts. It doesn’t help that I start to laugh.
“Dad!” she says.
“Oh, sorry, you were being serious?” I say. It’s tough to really know with preteens what’s a joke and what’s life and death and dear god the world is ending right now. The moods swing are so erratic that most days I feel like I’m watching a Plinko board.
“Yes! I’m being serious. Can I have SnapChat?”
“You’re twelve. Yeah, no. That’s not going to happen,” I say. The shaking of the house is my daughter stomping. I don’t think she quite understands yet the whole “putting your foot down thing.” It’s something that fathers do when they are trying to keep their daughters from being abducted or running away with a fifty-eight-year-old man named Clyde.
“All my friends have it,” she says. “Do you even know what it is?”
She’s whipping herself up, red and brown hair flies around her face. Little fists form at her sides. And the way she asks me if I know what it is, there is so much contempt in that voice. There’s spittle at the end of it. She is calling me old and out of touch, all in one breath. It’s a passive aggressive attack worthy of some kind of award. She passively aggressives way above her grade level.
“Yes, I know what it is. And thank you for telling me your friends have it so now I can call their parents,” I say.
“Dad!”
“Don’t dad me, little girl. I don’t care if your friends have it. If all of your friends jumped off a cliff, would you follow them?” At that moment, I feel that my own mother would be so very proud of me. As kids, we are told that phrase so much that it sticks with us. What we don’t realize, until we say it ourselves and mean it, is how wonderfully awesome that little nugget is.
“Yes! I would!”
Oh, well-played daughter. Well-played.
This is a fight that I knew was coming. I’ve been preparing for it. At what age should a kid be allowed on social media?
My initial reaction, as anyone can tell, is f*ck-no-never-not-in-a-million-years. I’m as reactionary as my daughter is passive-aggressive. But I’ve been thinking about this for a number of years, getting ready for this discussion.
So now my well thought out response is as follows:
Dear Daughter,
F*ck no, never not in a million years.
But how to explain this to my daughter, or any of our children? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Musically, Pinterest, and a thousand other social media platforms that I fully agree I don’t know about or understand. And while there is tremendous good in them, the ability to connect with people or organize actions, there is something else. Namely, the ability to connect with people and organize actions.
Meeting new friends that share the same interests and coordinating where you will meet up to protest and get a little social justice. That is awesome.
Meeting new friends who live in their mom’s basement and want to send you a train ticket to the southern tip of Mexico, not so awesome.
And I find it hard to believe that the maturity of my twelve-year-old can handle it when most times she still asks to hold my hand when we cross the street.
“Look, I know that you want to get SnapChat, Twitter, and whatever else. But the answer is still no. And it’s going to be no for a pretty long while. You don’t have to like it, that’s fine. You can even text your friends about what a complete butthole I am. That’s cool. Because as your dad, I have to be that way. There are a lot of weird people out there, people that you don’t need. And the minute you get online with something like that, they will find you.”
I know that it sounds overprotective, but it’s true. Even as a forty-three old man, I’ve dealt with this. My name is Shannon, which can be seen as a girls name at times. I get that.
I got sent a dick pic. Me. A schlong right there.
“Dad!” she says but nothing comes after it. She stomps, stomps, stomps up to her room. The door slams. More stomps come so that I wonder if I have earthquake insurance. And that is why she isn’t mature enough to have any social media. I don’t want to see her reactions tweeted out.
I know she will get online eventually, and there will be nothing I can do to stop it. But I hope to be able to teach her how to deal with the things, that frankly as a woman, she needs to know. Things that I thought I would never have to deal with, but apparently now do. She’s bright as hell, no doubt, but I’m not going to throw her to the wolves.
Ten minutes later I get a text from my wife letting me know that our daughter just asked her if she could get SnapChat, and if I’ve talked to her about it yet.
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Photo Credit: Pixabay