Have I mentioned to you all that my mom is a therapist? I think I've talked about it before. I'm not sure though. Lots of times when I tell people what she does, they remark that that must come in handy for me. (Apparently other people see me as someone who would need a therapist to talk to often. Go figure.) I'll admit that nowadays it is handy, especially when I need to know (usually on a daily basis) if something that my kids are doing is weird or not. It was not handy when I was a teenager and she was in the midst of earning her therapy license. Me and my hormones would throw some teenage drama emotional vomit her way and she'd respond with a cool "And how do you feel about that?", which drove me and my hormones crazy. We hated her.
So to sum it up: back then mom therapist= bad, now=good. I'm only telling you all this because I wanted to talk about a trend she told me that she saw occurring in her practice. Apparently more and more parents are bringing their kids in for addiction problems. Not addiction to drugs, or alcohol, or any of the usual stuff that we're used to hearing about. No. Parents nowadays are bringing their kids in because they are addicted to technology. Facebook, video games, texting- these things are becoming number one priorities in the lives of kids and grades, health, and social lives are going by the wayside. Not only that, but she thinks we're going to hear more about this kind of problem in the future. Apparently, Facebook Addiction is going to be what cutting and childhood obesity were for the last decade. I believe that someone should call the program directors at Maury and The View to let them know so they can start booking addicts now.
So when she told me this, I was all "HAHAHAHAHAHA. OH PLEASE! HOW HARD IS IT TO UNPLUG YOUR KID????"
HAHA.
HA.
Heh.
Um. How hard can it be to unplug your teenager? Well. Let's speak hypothetically for a moment. Let's say hypothetically we have a teenager in this house with that kind of problem. If I was going to really get into it, I could write a really good (hypothetical) tale with several good examples of what NOT to do in order to raise a teenager who isn't addicted to his phone/computer/video games. I could probably make it kind of funny too. But I won't. Because hypothetically, if there was a teenager like that around here, his life would be his and not for me to write about.
Hypothetically.
However, I will say this: A couple of months ago a friend of mine on Facebook wrote this: "I'd rather give birth to a ten pound baby while hanging upside down from a tree branch than have to raise another teenager."
The image made me laugh. Then it made me cry because I know only too well how she feels- how she probably just wants to do what's best for her kid, and he thinks she's stupid, and how she knows she's not only not stupid, but that she knows exactly what he's thinking because she once thought it too, and she tries to tell him and he doesn't believe that there's any way in the universe she could understand what he's thinking, and then she gets frustrated because she sees him making mistakes that she has the foresight to stop, but he, in his vast experience with life, thinks her foresight is just lame and wishes that she would just go away because he doesn't believe that he's ruining anything for himself long term.
Or maybe I'm just projecting.
Anyway. Before I go, I wanted to ask you if know how before you enter a momentous stage of life like marriage or parenting, and people seem to like to offer little tidbits of advice like, "marriage is work" or "having kids is hard"? You say "Yeah, yeah", not because you don't believe them, but because you know it's something you just have to experience before you can understand it? Yes? Well. Having teenagers will age you.
There you go. Consider yourself warned.
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