Confessions of a parenting failure

You believe incorrectly.

Well, maybe. Basically, there's been a lot of study on the subject, and the consensus is that talking on a cell phone to an unseen person detracts from your ability to drive. The reasoning is that your brain doesn't like talking to a void, so it sort of fills in where it imagines the person to be in front of you, and it uses a portion of its visual processing abilities to do that. This means your ability to process visual information, such as road conditions, is impaired.

The controversies come in two flavors:

A) Is that impairment enough to cause more accidents than would otherwise happen? Evidence is mixed.
B) Can your brain be trained to stop visualizing that way? Seems like it can.

But it's definitely different from other distractions.

 

I'd have to read the studies and see how they were conducted before I would buy that.
And I have to compare the results to crash rates for undistracted driving, if such a thing can even exist, and against any studies about other distractions.

 

That's an average of 400 a day. Assuming you're asleep for eight hours a day, that works out to 25 texts sent or received per waking hour. Good lord. How do you have time to do anything else?

 

Back in my day, I had overage charges on America Online, back when you only got like 200 minutes a month.

And I walked uphill to school in the snow.

 

You know how they rack up ridiculous texts? Stupid forwards that they send to everyone in their phone book.
My brother in law sends me a couple every week.

 

Off topic a bit, but I came in from playing basketball tonight to find the just-turned-12-year-old on Skype, catching up with a former classmate who moved to Canberra, Australia, about a year ago. Best I could figure it was about 11 a.m. Thursday over there when this conversation was taking place.

Me, I can't figure out how to turn off the speakerphone when I accidentally push the wrong button.

 

I have relatives who have a 10-year-old who has an iPhone and her own laptop with a camera that they allow her to use in her room by herself.

I told my wife, "I'm sure nothing bad will come out of a 10-year-old being able to surf the internet and send pictures without any supervision."

 

Last night the wife and I showed her, call by call, exactly how she used her minutes and how she used her texts. The cost of the text messages is not an issue, we are on the unlimited plan. The issue was the 1956 minutes of voice time she used during the same month and when she used them.

If this were a first offense I'd be a lot less worried and a lot more forgiving. But she's run up significant overages before. At least four times. This is by far the worst. She's had this talk before and had her phone taken away for a month before. I've even asked her 'boyfriend' who is on AT&T (we're Verizon) to keep the phone calls to a minimum and not during peak hours. She's promised it won't happen again and again and again. Doesn't seem to be working -- hence my self-labeling as a parenting failure.

Our phone bill, as we plainly showed her detail was $401.03 more than it was the previous month. Granted, I use my phone as my work phone as was involved in a few hour-long teleconferences. But my 800 minutes of air time use was well excused. Hers came at the expense of school work (yes, her grades are suffering this year thanks to all the normal teenage drama and devoting virtually every spare waking moment to that 'boyfriend' who she refuses to call a boyfriend) and family time.

She is extremely social. She has a ton of friends (nearly all of which, including the boy, I would classify as good kids) and tries to be involved in plenty of extracurricular activities. She is probably the top member of the school debate team and routinely brings home two or more trophies from the regional debate tournaments. As you might expect, this has given her a lot of attitude and confidence when it comes to negotiating her rights and privileges in regards to her responsibilities to herself and to her parents. It can be very frustrating when we are trying to parent her and teach her in instances such as this.

Perhaps we've spoiled her. She, like an awful lot of teens, has an oversized sense of entitlement. It took less than 12 hours before she started using the passive-aggressive attitude and debate skills to try and get her phone back. It didn't work ... this time.

Ahh, life as a parent

 

But, on another note:

My 10 year old, the one on the swim team, is very clever. She asked if she could play a game on my phone while she waited for the car pool to school this morning. She set my text message alert tone to sound like a long, juicy fart.

After about 10 farts, I figured it out. Glad I did before I had my lunch meeting with a potential business partner today

 

Idaho, you are doing a great job. It sounds like you have two great kids.

Charge the phones at night in your bedroom. At 9 or 10 p.m., they are off limits to the kids.

If they are taken off the charger, then that is an overt disobeying of the rules.

Do you think that would help?

 

My oldest's problem is playing Gamelounge on DirecTV which charges a few bucks per day for the premium games. He'll wake up at 4 or 5 and play it. He'll get in trouble for it for a few days and then be good for several months. For some reason, Gamelounge can't be blocked on DirecTV.

I worry about the kid because he's susceptible to some forms of peer pressure. He know stealing is wrong, knows saying bad words is wrongs, and doesn't make fun of other kids, but he'll disobey us on the little things.

 

You buried the lead.