Good Life: I'm Trying To Avoid Turning My Daughter Into A Soulless Ghoul
Do you ever have moments when you lose your resolve to continue the challenging but honorable mission you are on?
Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, we are discussing weddings, cellphones, and motherhood. Have you ever felt like you’ve been hit in the face with reality and then a little ashamed that you ever let yourself get to that point? Well, that’s what I dealt with this week when I realized that I was ready to make a big mistake.
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I’m Trying To Avoid Turning My Daughter Into A Soulless Ghoul
Do you ever have moments when you lose your resolve to continue the challenging but honorable mission you are on? I’m struggling with that right now. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know how I feel about giving teenagers phones. I don’t think they are mentally ready for the responsibility or for the emotional toll of being constantly connected to the world.
Still, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that lately I have been softening my stance. This is not because of pressure from our oldest daughter or my friends, but because I have become extremely exhausted being the phone police.
Our current situation is that my daughter is in all the class group chats, but since she doesn’t have a phone of her own, she uses mine to communicate. This allows her to stay connected with her friends and get last-minute updates on plans or schoolwork, while also providing the safety and security of not having it on her at all times. And it works. She doesn’t complain about not having a phone and honestly never asks for one.
However, my own selfish need to disconnect sometimes creeps into the equation. So while she doesn’t ask for a phone, I’ve been a little more on the fence about allowing her to have one. That was until this weekend, when I went to my sister-in-law’s wedding, and I heard something that snapped me out of it.
I take a lot of pride in the fact that our girls get complimented on their behavior when we are out in public. I’ve taught them to look adults in the eye and answer them respectfully. They can carry on conversations without my help about a myriad of topics, which typically sends the adults my way to heap praise on their good behavior. In fact, there is probably nothing that brings me greater joy than seeing people love having our girls around.
During one of the bus rides to the pre-wedding activities, one of my sister’s friends complimented our oldest daughter on her ability to speak eloquently about a complex subject without fear or hesitation. “How did you manage to teach her to do this? Every other teenager I know can barely string a sentence together,” she asked me.
I had to answer honestly, even though in the back of my mind I knew I had been a bit of a hypocrite in the hidden places of my heart. It was the lack of having a cell phone. When she is out in public, she has two options: either stare at the wall or learn to converse with other people. She is an extrovert, so she chose to talk.
That’s when every other adult started chiming in, agreeing with their own stories of how teenagers always change the moment the phone is placed in their hands. They become walled off and easily ignore the world around them because their universe has become what they consume on their device.
I don’t want that kind of life for her. I want her to continue to grow and blossom into a young woman who can think clearly and speak passionately about anything that is important to her. She deserves to have this level of protection from us.
So, needless to say, my resolve has been fully restored.
Sometimes, all it takes is one conversation to snap you back into reality and remind you that what you are fighting for as a parent is more important than short-term peace. Honestly, I’m a little embarrassed that I needed a course correction. I am typically more steadfast when it comes to critical parental matters than this, but as y’all know, these last several months have been some of the most exhausting of my life.
Between dealing with the shock of almost losing my husband, who is the greatest love I have ever known, to immediately starting school with all the activities that accompany it, and my last two single sisters getting married within a month of each other, it feels like I’ve lived a year in the last three months.
Still, I shouldn’t have allowed life to get in the way of what I knew to be right. That’s what I want to caution you about today. When you have children, there is always going to be a choice to do the right thing or go the path of least resistance. I can tell you from firsthand experience, especially when they are toddlers, that the easier path at the moment almost always leads to harder parental work on the other side.
I’m in the season of nonstop activity. This past weekend was a great reminder that I cannot give up the good fight. My husband and I have worked too hard to stop now before the mission is over.
We joked at the wedding that the next Rooke wedding will likely be hers or one of my other daughters. Everyone else laughed a bit, but inside I felt a little sting in my heart. This is yet another mixed emotion of sadness and pride that I know the end of the road is fast approaching. I have maybe four years left to relay all the instructions I need to give her before she will be out in the world without me.
Make sure to tune in next week for what will likely be an over-emotional edition because this weekend is Homecoming.
WHAT I SAW THIS WEEK:
Some of my column readers were a little upset with a piece I wrote Tuesday about polling that showed our nation’s youngest adults do not believe they’ll be able to accumulate significant wealth or buy a home, and a historically low number of them rate having children as an essential part of their future. Many of the reasons this generation feels so much angst stem from decisions made by the Boomer generation that have made the American Dream so unattainable. I think they misunderstood that I wasn’t attacking them, but rather trying to explain how these decisions have hurt younger generations, in hopes that in the future we can stop it. You can read about that HERE.
Also, I was honored to join Lara Trump on her podcast, “The Right View,” on Tuesday. It’s always fun talking politics and crazy cultural happenings with Lara and her guests. I encourage you to watch that HERE.
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