https://www.facebook.com/RabbiWolffCentralSynagogue/videos/2149495661959998/UzpfSTE1NTY2MDUyMTY6MTAyMTcwMjg2MTQyNTgzMjY/
This is so dear! someone sent me this same link with a comment “This is scary!” And my response was, “well…yes and no!” Let me say why.
All children grow in opposition to their parents, society, everybody and everything. AND they know it all. Remember the Mark Twain quote “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”
If you recall, television was going to be the destruction of society: ” Is television destroying our children’s minds?” from a 2004 article. Before it was heavy metal, rap, the jitterbug, the flapper, the suffragette’s….probably that cave kid who fashioned an arrowhead and attached it to the stick he had, scared the juice out of the elders!
So that’s my first position.
This is my second.
You’re the parent! In the same way you set limits on everything, you need to do it here. I didn’t let my children watch TV all the time or listen to their music constantly. We had parameters and they chose among acceptable alternatives. We, the parents set the parameters and they got to choose within that… what they would watch, when they would watch. We did things as family, and included their friends and their friends families. We talked and had time together. As parents we teach and hope for the best for our children. To do otherwise sets them up for failure.
Now that I’m a grandmother I have a different role and responsibilities. Grandparents have the opportunity to give the parents a break, teach the kids, and pass on whatever vision we have created of the meaning of things. We are also the stop-gap, the place for little extravagances. When my grandchildren were little we would have “cookie parties” on my bed one night during their visit. We would laugh and giggle…and talk. We did get cookie crumbs in my bed…so what?!!! It was once a year! Now they are teens. We don’t do cookie parties anymore.
The other week they were here for their visit. Their mom walked into my bedroom and asked what we were doing. The three of us were in the dark with our tablets going….blue electronic light reflecting off our faces. I looked up and laughed, ” we’re having an electronics party.”
This is actually a positive. We had shared videos, I know about the boy band my granddaughter LOVES!!! My grandson showed me something awful in an utterly awful game teaser on YouTube. And my comment was, this is truly awful and you deserve to watch better. What you watch will shape your brain and make your mind grow straight or crooked. When I watched a targeted alien game we talked about killing…and how would he know an alien is bad or dangerous.
Did it get in? I think so. When they were helping me make my bed
the next day a spider jumped across the pillow. ” Can I kill it??” the boy asked…looking at me with a huge grin. “No! Catch it and put it outside! Then I told them what my dad told me when I was three and stamping on ants.
“Pup, you cannot create a life, an ant, and you cannot take that life.” The message from their great grandfather was loud and clear.
If you cannot do this you are contributing to your child’s anxiety and depression, his or her inability to engage and connect with others and learn self- regulation. It is not the phone, computer, tablet that is the problem…it’s the parenting. If you can’t do it. Then get help to learn how.
