Santa Claus and the Internet

When my kids were little, I was self-endowed with great amounts of the sort of wisdom one has when one has never been a parent. I knew exactly how I wanted to raise them, how I mould out of their open and trusting characters thoughtful, creative people who pursued their own goals but did so out of self-knowledge and a sense of justice and fairness. Now they are teenagers and they are really good kids but I still can’t avoid questions about our choices and whether I would do things differently.

Clearly this is somewhat of an obsession; the novel I just finished has this as a central question. How to raise kids when the internet has their own ideas about who they should be?

I wanted my kids to have a childhood, one where they got muddy and collected bugs and created fairy houses out of sticks and moss and acorns. They read books and drew, painted, sewed, knitted and seemed altogether happy. Then they found out about the internet. And they were pissed.

We were able to keep it from them (as if it was a dirty secret)only by sending them to a Waldorf school, and even then apple products oozed in through cracks in the rough-hewn walls. By seventh grade, iPhones were like sex — some kids had them, those without felt cheated; everyone was categorized by whether or not they’d lost their “innocence.”

My kids got phones in high school, which is pretty late by most standards. I don’t understand why anyone would need (as opposed to want) them earlier, but that’s me. They were thrilled of course, but underneath their liberation there was — and continues to be — a sense of righteous fury: All these funny cats and people failing were here all along and you kept them from us! It’s eerily similar to the way my son in particular feels (rightly so!) about Santa Claus, as fraud perpetuated on him for years.

I have second thoughts about the Santa Claus decision; if I could go back we’d probably celebrate Solstice instead and swear them to secrecy around their classmates, but exposure to the internet brings up even more fraught emotions. Not only are they let loose online, but it’s with a complete understanding of my feelings about it’s many problems (yes yes, there is much good there but teenagers do not tend to gravitate to the more enlightening aspects of the online world), which makes their phones a tool of rebellion.

Maybe if I’d just gotten over myself and let them have phones earlier, they could have had a healthier relationship with technology. I have few doubts that it will all settle down — my son will start reading again, my daughter might one day compare what I say to what an influencer says and favor my perspective — but was it worth it for them to have that real world tactile childhood? I do think so, but what do I know?