Dear Jeffro,
I finally relented and let my teenage daughter get her own cell phone. A neighbor of mine up the street warned my wife and me not to do it. To hold out as long as we could. “Biggest mistake we ever made,” he said of allowing his own daughter to get a phone. Then he added, as his wife joined in unison, that if we purchased the phone “the gates of Hell would open.”
While I wasn’t a fan of getting the phone, our neighbors saying this felt on the extreme side. Surely we could find a middle ground with certain parameters in place. Right?
However, shortly after the phone arrived and was activated, the gates of Hell did indeed open. It was just like in the movie, coincidentally named The Gate, starring a young Stephen Dorff. You may recall this film from 1987 in which two young boys accidentally summon tiny demons smaller than a chihuahua from a hole in the ground in their backyard.
Pro tip: don’t let the arborists remove the tree stump. Ever. Let nature take its course. Place a potted plant on the stump for decorative purposes.
The only difference between the tiny demons unearthed from the hole in the ground in The Gate and what we are now experiencing in our household is that the tiny demons are contained within the screen of a phone. They are called influencers.
There’s a makeup influencer. A hair influencer. A karaoke influencer or something of this nature. I don’t know what you call it. They lip sync the first 10 seconds of a song and share it with millions of people who in turn mimic what the influencer does by making their own version of the shared video. Makes no sense. There’s a hype dance influencer. A nail influencer. An influencer who videos themselves cleaning their room and reorganizing it.
The latter influencer I’m not hating on. Kid finally has a clean room for the first time in years.
But where the hell is the homework influencer? The listen to your parents influencer? The go to bed at a decent time influencer. The influencer who shows you how not to drain the battery of your phone watching YouTube shorts? The stop eating all the chips because they go with sandwiches and aren’t a standalone meal influencer.
On family movie night while we were watching Rambo: First Blood, I politely asked my daughter to please put the phone away so we could enjoy the film. She ignored me and started blasting Kendrick Lamar while waving her hands in the air. When I pleaded again, she asked me if I was little mad or big mad.
I don’t know. How about frustrated mad?
Then, after stopping Rambo: First Blood on multiple occasions during Act One’s inciting incident when the sheriff’s deputies try to dry shave my main man John Rambo and his PTSD is triggered, my daughter said the movie was ‘mid’ anyway.
My son then got big mad and said his older sister was capping. That Rambo: First Blood wasn’t mid. It was Gucci.
I have no idea what’s going on now. The gate is so vast and wide we’re all falling in. The soles of my shoes are dripping from the heat of the fire. I would say it’s lit but I think that’s incorrect usage. How do I close the gates of Hell? Is it even possible?
— A concerned father who inadvertently opened the gates of Hell in his living room because he didn’t hold fast against purchasing his daughter a cell phone even though it went against his better judgment
Dear Concerned Father who inadvertently opened the gates of Hell in his living room because he didn’t hold fast against purchasing his daughter a cell phone even though it went against his better judgment,
I see that you’re shook and rightfully so. When you were hit with rapid-fire Gen Z slang you didn’t even know how to clapback appropriately. Been there, done that my dude. But you ain’t tripping. But these kids fo sho are.
Modern day cell phones, unlike the flip phones we carried in our twenties (and some of us into our mid-30s because we’re cheapskates and reluctant adopters of the latest tech) do have the all-powerful ability to summon the gates of Hell open with the tap of a button called wi-fi and/or cellular data which connects them to:
The modern Internet
A.K.A Hell
Once the influencers enter your crib, it’s hard to get them stepping. They take up permanent residence in the minds of our youth. You picking up what I’m laying down?
I honestly have no good advice for you in this situation, but I’ll try my best regardless. I, too, buckled under the pressure. For the longest time, my daughter was the only one of her friends who didn’t have a phone. Even communications from the sports teams she played on were sent via text or through an app, which meant she had to use my wife’s phone.
After pressure from my wife over the course of an entire summer, I caved. It’ll just be for communication we agreed. We’re not doing all the extras. Talk, text, and maybe an appropriate game or two. That’s it.
In hindsight, there’s a part of me that wishes I hadn’t. You can’t close Pandora’s Box. Phones are the ultimate distraction device for those without a fully developed frontal lobe. It’s arguable this is the case for most all generations now, however.
You can put all the restrictions in the world on the phone and teenagers circumvent ways around them. If there’s a will, there’s a way. Granted, I’m no technology fool despite not being a fan. But the more restrictions you add, the more arguments arise. It can feel like a losing battle.
The horde of tiny demons we know as influencers are a sneaky bunch. There’s an unrepentant egotism to it all. But if we take a step back, how is what this generation is doing much different than what other generations did in years prior or are doing themselves, now, on the Internet?
The 24/7 news cycle and its blabbering mouthpieces could easily be classified as influencers of our parents’ generation. Guys like Limbaugh, Hannity, and O’Reilly on the right or Maddow and Olbermann on the left. We witnessed in real-time ordinary, sane human beings turn terrified of the world around them. Of ‘the other.’ Including fellow Americans. That’s where and when the division began growing at a breakneck pace. The idea of two Americas, not one.
Megachurch pastors of yesteryear. Were they not influencers? Even small town preachers could be classified as influencers in certain denominations. They held persuasion. Guys like Joe Rogan aren’t teeny boppers. He’s in his fifties. Is Rogan not an influencer?
Who, what, or how we define celebrity and what they define as celebrity are no longer one and the same.
The difference is Gen Z is taking ordinary people, not manufactured celebrities from traditional media platforms, and placing them on a pedestal. Instead of Fox News, MSNBC, or Facebook, they’ve got YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and the tickety tock (the latter which should be banned and the ban upheld).
Instead of staring slack jawed at a glowing television screen with feet propped up in a recliner, our kids are staring into tiny handheld screens while somehow managing to walk around without bumping into everything.
It bothers us, perhaps more than we’d like to admit, because we see a little bit of ourselves in their habits. We just don’t recognize it because the tech is smaller. Think less about when you got your first smartphone and more about when the Internet entered your life.
I remember visiting my friends at Radford their first year in college in the late 90s and on their computer screen was AOL Instant Messenger. It was text messaging before text messaging and I was in a state of wow. When I returned home, I downloaded it onto my computer and spent entirely too much of my life sending messages back and forth to my friends and updating my status.
A ridiculous amount of time.
Before that, Excite chatrooms where you could find groups of people talking about any topic imaginable. I hung out mostly in the punk rock chatrooms. How much time did I spend there? Immeasurable. I started blogging at 15 years old in 1997 before the word “blogging” was even invented. I’d be a complete hypocrite to ignore how many hours and days of my life have been spent online staring red-eyed at a blue lit screen.
Sure, I still ventured out into the real world back then (and now). I saved the Internet largely for nighttime. Plus, in order to use the Internet back in the 1990s and 00s, you had to tie up your landline which didn’t sit well with your parents.
I don’t know how old you are. But it sounds like we are a similar age since you have a teenage daughter. We may even have the exact same birthday. This is probable since I made up the question you asked in the first place and this entire advice column is fictional.
What you’re wrestling with, however, is real. It’s something many parents are struggling with. When we grew up, there were no smartphones (obviously). Many of us spent more time hanging out with friends in real life than we did on the Internet. I’d argue that most kids today want to do the same. Somewhere down the line, before we had kids, this changed.
I’d point back to the infiltration of the 24/7 cable news cycle when suddenly everyone was told the streets weren’t safe. A foundation was laid years ago. Kids shouldn’t play unsupervised. If someone got hurt playing with a friend, instead of letting the two kids work through interpersonal conflict without an adult butting in, one parent would no longer allow their child to play with the other. Friend groups shrunk as a result.
We are now witnessing the end results of this framework built from the ground-up decades ago. These parenting styles continue to exist.
It was quite the reversal from the world you or I grew up in when my friends and I would routinely fight one another every now and again. Do you know how many times my cousin Robbie sucker punched me in the stomach during a game of 2-on-2 basketball? Countless.
Did I hate him for it? Maybe for thirty minutes. Then all was back to normal. It was the heat of competition. It happened. Not to mention, I punched other friends myself. I tapped Rick in the nose on at least two occasions. Guess who I still talk to today?
My point is, there was an evolution (de-evolution really) that made where we are today possible. It took place years before either of us got married and started having children. It was when the helicopter parent was born. Then the lawnmower parent.
Because of these over-involved parenting styles, kids were sheltered and told to stay inside where it was physically safe. And because of this, and with the emergence of pocket technology, they are physically safe (less mentally well off, however) — yet, they still want to connect with friends and with others who share similar interests. They still want to laugh and feel something.
That may be a healthier perspective for you as a parent even if it doesn’t close the gates of Hell for you.
The problem isn’t our children or influencers. It’s the de-evolution of childhood coinciding with advanced technology made possible by adults and ill intentioned corporations who came before us.
For our childhood and even teenage years, we grew up with both feet in the physical world. The myriad distractions were less. Then in our late teens, the Internet entered. It would still take a few years before we took one foot out of the physical world and placed it in the digital world.
For our kids, their entire lives have been in a wholly digital world when it comes to available technology. It’s not apples to apples. It’s apples to oranges in comparison to our teenage years.
Actionable advice to help close the gates of hell a smidgen
If I was giving actionable advice, and my guess is this is what you’re after, it would be to entertain their interests. It’s easy to view the phone as the ultimate distraction. What your child is really after though is connection. So, if they want to show you a video they think is funny on their phone, let them. Even if you are left scratching your head how what you just watched is considered funny at all.
This is also a sign we are old now. Welcome to the club. You’ll find cheese and crackers at the table on your left. Tums for the heartburn you’ll later experience.
For example, the other day, my daughter asked us to play a game as a family. That’s been a rare ask for a while now. We went with it. It involved her phone. I was teetering on a meh because of this. But we ended up laughing together as a family harder than we have in a long time.
The game was called Brain Rot Challenge. It involves you, as a parent, reading Gen Z slang while your child (or children) try not to spit out a mouthful of water they are holding in their mouth. You will be asked to be video recorded on their phones. And your kids will spit out water so have a bowl and a towel ready.
Apparently, there’s nothing Gen Z finds funnier than us old geezers trying to pronounce nonsensical words or words we have no idea what the meaning is behind them. I’d link a handy list of Gen Z slang for you but that’d take the fun out of the game. Play the game first. Then look up what the words mean.
My parting words are one of reframing how you view the phone. Writing back to you has even helped me see it from a different perspective. That disconnect you feel is a void. But I don’t believe for a second it’s a void you can’t fill. Your daughter wants to connect: with you, their friends, with those who have likeminded interests.
Meet her halfway.
After more engagement on your part, see if you all can lay down ground rules for phone usage that everyone in the house agrees with. No phone in sight at dinner. No phone in the room when watching a movie. Phone away when it’s time to do homework. Ear buds in when blasting music.
It’s a different world now and it’s mind boggling to us who grew up in a largely disconnected pre-Internet world altogether. The gates of Hell have always been open. Influencers have always been around. Maybe less bite-sized than now. Or is that byte-sized?
But Zach Morris from Saved By the Bell was there in my childhood, just as he was in yours. Because while we’re different people, we aren’t that different. Although you are actually not a different person than me because I made you and your question up. But you get my point.
Jeffro
Previously Bad Advice Archive
Dear Jeffro is a completely fictional advice column where I pretend to be someone else asking a question and then respond to it with all the ignorance wisdom I have accumulated in my 40-plus years of existence. May contain nostalgic elements from the 1980s and 90s.