I was sick yesterday, down with a cold. I spent a lot of the day in bed, on my phone. As you do.
At one point, my wife walked in and noticed that I was scrolling or watching videos or playing Retro Bowl (it’s awesome!).
“You’re doing exactly what you get on the kids about.”
“I know.”
“So you’re aware you’re a hypocrite?”
“100 percent.”
Here’s the thing: every parent is a hypocrite!
It’s part of the gig. We need to impart lessons to our children that are essential to their ability to survive in the world, even while we live much of our own lives in direct opposition to them.
We tell them not to drink too much, to avoid using foul language, to get a good night’s sleep, to eat vegetables, to exercise regularly, to start the day with a good breakfast, to try new things and meet new people, even while we ignore those lessons—the same ones our parents taught us—and live our disgusting little lives of hypocrisy.
In my house, phone usage is the biggest example of all.
We didn’t want to get Detective Munch a phone.
He turned 13 in September and he desperately wanted one. We were reluctant, but he’s a teenager now, which allows for a little more independence, and he takes the city bus to school, which requires both a reliable way to communicate with us (and his friends) and access to GPS navigation. Besides, we’d managed to hold off until he became a teen—sure, he’s had access to other devices, but we’d kept him off social media until the end of middle school (god forbid he find out his dad hates him!)—which we consider a major victory.
So I gave him an old iPhone and set up parental controls and now every day I get a barrage of heavily-typo’d, poorly punctuated texts begging me to loosen those controls and let him live his life inside the Matrix.
When I tell him no, he gets annoyed, and then when I explain that we don’t want him locked into his phone all the time to the detriment of his relationships (especially with us) and his responsibilities, he points out that I myself am locked into my phone all the time. And he’s not wrong.
Except he is.
At the end of the day, what do all parents want for their kids? (Besides the easy stuff like health and happiness.) We want them to be better than us.
We enter this whole experiment hoping to raise our children to be better people than we are, to have more success than we have, to avoid our mistakes and make fewer of them. One of my mistakes? Phone addiction. And I don’t want that for him!
Does that make me a hypocrite? Technically I suppose it does, but that’s the name of the parenting game! That’s what the job is. Just because we don’t always do better doesn’t mean we don’t know better. One of the curses of being an adult is the wisdom of knowing what to do while lacking the ability to overcome yourself and actually do it. With experience comes regret.
But with innocence comes ignorance, and that’s where Mom and Dad come in! We’re there to fill in the blanks that, sadly, can’t truly be filled in without going living through it.
That’s the eternal folly of parenthood. It’s an ongoing, Sisyphean attempt to force-feed lessons to our kids that can’t actually be learned by our kids until they get them wrong.
As an adult, I’ve learned those lessons, even if I don’t practice them. I spent the first 18 or so years of my life learning under my parents’ roof, and while we didn’t have iPhones back then, we had plenty of other things that they restricted my access to for fear of negative repercussions. Kids brains are soft and impressionable; preventing them from forming the wrong way is a huge part of parenting.
Did I love the fact that my parents didn’t let me see INTERNAL AFFAIRS when I was a kid? Of course not. Did I want to sit around and drink wine while they discussed politics? Not really, but also kind of! My parents didn’t let me do those things because they didn’t think I was ready for those things. As adults, they knew better (maybe not always best, but definitely better), and as parents who provided for me in every possible way, they made the rules. I had little choice but to abide (as far as they knew!) until I was old enough to be on my own.
And neither does my son, even if saying I don’t want him melting his brain by being on his phone all the time makes me a hypocrite.
I’ve earned my brain melting time! I went through childhood and adolescence and high school and college and now I’m an full-grown adult who answers to no one! (Except my wife and my bosses and my children and sometimes my cat and occasionally angry strangers online.) I have a job(s). And for better or worse, my brain is fully developed; the damage has already been done. My 13-year-old’s is still mush and will remain so until his mid-twenties. It’s my job to do my best to keep it on the right track for as long as possible, and that track does not include non-stop meme-hunting and YouTube watching.
Besides, he’s still in the mines. He’s got to pay his dues before he earns the right to make his decisions. You have to learn the rules before you can break them! (The catch-22 of it all is that by the time you’ve learned all the rules, the consequences to breaking them get a lot bigger. The myriad responsibilities of adulthood defy carelessness.)
Kids need to grow up with a strong foundation: good morals, a strong work ethic, healthy habits, a sense of responsibility, and a solid, nicely formed brain, and it’s my job to instill all of that in mine, whether they like it or not. Sometimes that means stopping them from forming the very bad habits I put on display everyday. Sorry, life ain’t fair, and there are different rules for adults and kids. That’s why I can drive and vote and join the army and get a colonoscopy and my kids can’t. Suckers!
Now, is this all just me rationalizing my behavior and making apologies for being a bad role model? Yes, obviously.
My son is right that I don’t always model the best behavior and I could do a better job of providing a good example. I know I need to be on my phone less, and that I should drink less, and swear less, and go to bed earlier, and eat more vegetables, and exercise more often, and start the day with a good any breakfast, and try new things and meet new people.
Just because my brain has stopped developing doesn’t mean I can’t improve, as a person and as a parent. I probably won’t, but I should try.
My kids have no choice.
(P.S. I still haven’t seen INTERNAL AFFAIRS)
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Pop Culture Stuff
I don’t go to the theater much anymore, because kids, but there are a few movies I’ve really wanted to see that I haven’t been able to yet, like OPPENHEIMER and KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON. Those movies are long as hell, and it’s hard to find a four-hour window—when I’m not working or parenting or sleeping—into which to fit those epics. When I do go to the theater, it’s usually to see a blockbuster (everything else is fine to stream) with my kids (so we don’t need to pay a babysitter), which means my next best bet is THE MARVELS. Even though I’m pretty burnt out on the MCU, I’m no hater, but I’m not exactly psyched out of my mind to see it either. Stupid kids.
The best new thing I’ve seen recently was probably WHEN EVIL LURKS, a brutal little horror movie from Argentina that was part of my Spooktober slate. And I’m definitely going to be watching THE KILLER this weekend. I love Fincher (I re-watched THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO the other day, and even his lesser movies are incredibly watchable) and any new movie from him is an event for me.
Other than that, I can’t wait for the new Nathan Fielder show, The Curse, which hits Showtime November 10th (I think?).
After a nice summer run of shows that ended with Chappell Roan, I’ve got no new concerts on the docket. Wish I could see Liz Phair do Exile in Guyville in its entirety—one of my favorite albums of all time!—but I’ll be out of town for Thanksgiving. Stupid pilgrims.
Milestone!
I hit 1000 subscribers to this little Substack, less than a year after I launched it. Thanks so much for reading! (I’m also thisclose to 300k on IG, so if you don’t follow me there yet, get to it!)
So far, only about 15 of you pay (1.5% of all subscribers), for which I’m forever grateful, but I’d love to get that up to 5% (or more!) and I’m gonna really start thinking about what to offer that might make paying worth your while. Let me know if there’s anything that might entice you to throw me a measly five bucks my way every month. I say measly because it sounds like a little, but I know it’s not easy these days. The mere fact that your five bucks would mean so much to me shows that it isn’t “a little” at all (I lost my freelance income in the spring, and have been scraping together every little bit to stay afloat) and I appreciate everyone who pays. I’ll try to keep making it worth your while! Tell your friends!
Finally, my book, Dad Truths, won’t come out until next spring, but it won’t be long before I start promoting the hell out of it. Get ready to hear about pre-orders - and some special pre-order incentives! I’ll try not to be too annoying but this thing has gotta sell so I can get book number two going. I’ve already got a great idea for it! (Hint: It’s NOT about how much I love parenting.)