My sons turn 15 next month and my wife and I think they spend too much time with technology.
Which makes us like pretty much every other family in America.
In the boys’ favor, they respect the limits we set in terms of content—to our knowledge, they don’t watch videos with violence and they don’t appear to have discovered sex yet.
On top of that, they both got great grades in school this year.
At 15, I discovered alcohol and girls.
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No trips to the principal’s office.
No behavior issues. You couldn’t really ask for more.
Okay, maybe a few dishes in the sink, but that’s about it.
And then I started thinking about what I was doing at their age.
It wasn’t great.
At 15, I discovered alcohol and girls.
My father was a verbally abusive alcoholic, so my mom would get me out of the house for the summer.
“Think about all the brain cells we’re killing.”
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I’d be on these trips where I could drink with other kids.
No one knew how much I drank or how often.
I did.
I was drinking as much as half a gallon of beer a night.
When you’re 15, that’s a lot of beer.
Actually, that’s a lot of beer at any age.
Of course, I didn’t have a drinking problem, and for that, I was grateful.
The other kids were drinking just as much as I was, so what was the big deal?
We joked, as do most teenagers, “Think about all the brain cells we’re killing.”
Turns out it wasn’t such a joke, and I wish I could get some of those brain cells back.
And then came the second great discovery—girls.
I don’t believe I need to elaborate.
Too much YouTube barely looks like a problem at all.
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So that’s where I was at 15.
So let me get this straight.
My biggest problem today with my sons is that they watch a little too much YouTube?
Or play those addictive, dopey online video games?
Nobody’s getting drunk.
Nobody’s getting anybody pregnant.
Of course, anything can happen today, tomorrow, or the next day.
But just for today, I think I’ll stick with the problems we have.
By contrast with my own dopey teenage years, too much YouTube barely looks like a problem at all.
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Photo: Getty Images
Back in your time, at least you can go outside and play. You can’t do it anymore these days. With the technology these days, the kids are not having the communication skills that they will need when they actually have to talk to someone face to face and that is bad when many of them grow up and have families of their own. To be fair, many families did not have good communications skills either when computer technology was non-existence or when it was not sophisticated compare to today.
You are right, for the problems they do have today’s kids are much more controlled than we were. Most of those I grew up with were wild child types, drink drugs sex all by 14 or 15. We were the rat tail end of the boomers….grown up to expectations of nuclear annihilation and not much time to live, in a stagnant economy with little hope.