I love you, but I don’t need to know your status every second

Scott Warnock,

I enjoy my kids a lot, and I try to express interest in all of their goings-on. I want to know what they’re up to. I like to hear about what happened in school and who likes who and who cheated in kickball and the dead beetle they saw this morning.

Yes, I love my kids, but, and I must be clear about this, I do not want a moment-by-moment update of their status.

Kids apparently need to keep their parents constantly updated about every moment of their lives. Everything needs to be told. Here is a sample of ten minutes and six seconds of a recent day of mine.

12:01:45: Child 1 reports that she’s hungry.
12:02:17: Child 3 tells me he’s thirsty.
12:02:20: Child 3 now updates his situation to “I’m dying of thirst.”
12:03:21: Child 2 pronounces that he hears a “weird” buzzing sound outside.
12:05:54: Child 1 proclaims that her little toe is “sore.” She walks through the house to report this and points to the offending toe.
12:07:11: Child 3 says the chair he is sitting in is “a little wobbly.”
12:08:14: Child 1 says she is thinking about flowers. Yellow flowers.
12:10:09: Child 2 indicates that the buzzing noise has stopped.
12:10:13: Child 4 (I have three kids, so I’m not sure who Child 4 is) indicates the buzzing may have started again.
12:10:37: Child 2 says Legos are his favorite toy.
12:10:40: Child 3 claims Child 2’s liking of Legos is less than his.
12:11:14: Child 1, while eating a sandwich, reports she doesn’t like sandwiches. (This in direct contrast to a status report yesterday.)
12:11:51: Child 2, knocking on the door of the bathroom, where I’ve hidden myself unsuccessfully, declares he likes the wallpaper in the living room.

As the updates pile up, I feel the camera zooming on my face; my jaw drops and my eyes empty of life; I look like a dad in a typical sugary snack commercial: Victimized, dopey, beaten.

It could not have always been like this. Perhaps children always had this newscaster-like desire, but at one time, they were supposed to seen and not heard, yes?

When you saw the title to this article, you may have been thinking Facebook. That makes sense, since social media tools have a strong status-affirming aspect to them. Maybe that’s the cause of all this, because it seems reasonable that our digital approaches to “status” have bled into our culture’s face-to-face interactions. Video games may also contribute, as these games provide incredibly detailed status information, metrics, and feedback. Maybe the cause is just excessive parenting, with parents setting themselves up by constantly asking barely verbal tots if they like the way things are: “Are you having fun?!” These tots, shrewd as Gollum, quickly get the idea that their responses matter greatly.

Whatever the cause, kids are growing up with the idea that cogitating about exactly how they are exactly now is part of existence — but only if you make that information available to others.

Of course, I do hope that my own children’s desire to express their observations about wobbly chairs and nice wallpaper may mean that when the stakes are higher in a few years, they will see me as someone who they can approach to talk over more difficult, weighty topics.

But, alas, I have my limits. Those limits are even more acute when we’re all crammed somewhere, like in a car or a mine. In close quarters, the barrage of updates, often about states of being that would challenge many a philosopher, are insufferable.

So, in cars and mines at least, I have declared war on status updates: My dear children, I love you all. But I’m sorry, I just don’t care what you’re experiencing at every given second. Don’t be distraught. Your parents are only part of the audience of your lives, and our role shrinks exponentially as the years move on. Rest assured, some day you will write your complaints and observations, and out there in your digital social sphere will no doubt be some kindred spirit, a fellow screenager, who hearing about your sore toe and the annoying buzzing noises, will think with great deliberation about her or his own aching digits and neighborhood cacophony and show support, sympathy, and perhaps even love by clicking “Like.” You will be affirmed. The great wheel will turn on.

Scott Warnock

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.
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Comments (9)

  1. Well, if they don’t get the message that every second of their lives isn’t important to everyone around them, at some point, then they are bound to become the young adults/adults who tell everyone on Facebook (my favorite status of all time): “Wawa sandwich.” If dads like you make their position clear, less people will see “Who the F— cares?” in their future digital status updates.

  2. I hope you keep this one bookmarked for when you have teenagers who barely say 10 words to you all week and the only message is “give me money.” :)

  3. Well, sorry to say, it doesn’t get a whole lot better when they get older! (Well, maybe a teensy bit better). And did you ever figure out who child #4 was?? HAHAHAHAHA!

  4. Guide To Tough Love & Peace …beat child #4… blame it on child #1, #2, and #3…let the court put em away… but be sure to send them cookies once a week while they’re in juvenile detention… “Serenity Now!”

  5. “And one time, at Band Camp…”
    This is how we’ve started cutting off the too-frequent and going-nowhere updates of our children (1, 2 or 3). Once they got the idea we were making fun of them, the reports started to slow down. Except the 4 year-old; he just got mad.

    Scott–you are a fly on our wall.

  6. Oh no, say it ain’t so Scott? How do we explain my 50 something older sister and her “Chicken Marsala for dinner tonight” posts on facebook?
    IDK

  7. There is nothing new under the sun. You have just described an excruciating car ride I took with my niece and nephews twenty years ago.

  8. Warnock, you may think you only have 3 children, but have you spoken to your wife about this yet? lol. I can’t tell, either, when it comes to my younger siblings or niece … what’s driving the endless monologue and self absorption? Is it oversimplifying it to point to age (and I”m often guilty of age-ism, so that could be it) … but when I was a kid, no matter age, I really recall that keeping information FROM my parents was the norm. I mean, I really didn’t want my parents to know what I was doing or thinking or who I was hanging out with … I just went and DID it, ha ha, sometimes with consequences, but all of us kids were outside all the time playing and kinda getting into trouble. I feel blessed to have grown up without technology, as much as it’s an occupational hazard now, because I really and truly can unplug.

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