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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, Coldplay is now the second best concert I’ve ever attended, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a parenting story.
Today’s Fun Fact: Did you know that yesterday was National Bow Tie Day? Well if you’re a Doctor Who fan, you know that the 11th Doctor taught us that bow ties are cool. So here are some fun facts about bow ties:
- Many believe that their first use was during the Prussian wars when Croatian mercenaries used them to tie their shirt collars shut.
- According to GQ, perfect alignment is not expected — nor preferred. This neckwear is suppose to look somewhat floppy or off-kilter.
- After Matt Smith uttered the words, “Bowties are cool,” a spokesman for the online store Topman reported bowtie sales increased by 94%.
- New Year’s Eve is the #1 day to wear a bow tie, followed by Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, and National Bow Tie Day.
What I Learned Yesterday
Parenting is hard. In fact, it might just be the hardest thing I do. Like most parents, I want to teach my kids to be responsible, caring, selfless, compassionate, honest, hard working, and confident. Kari and I set rules and boundaries in a way that we believe is best for them given their age, maturity, and well-being. Of course, we aren’t perfect so we don’t always get it right, but we do our best.
You may recall from episode 438 that we got a cell phone for our daughter just before the start of summer. What you don’t know is that she got the phone taken away from her about 3 weeks later and didn’t get it back until school started. Yep, she lost her phone privileges for the whole summer. Not only that, but she lost her friend privileges for the whole summer. So how did that happen?
When we first got her the phone we sat her down and talked about the rules of the phone. We would be monitoring her texts and calls. She would be limited on her ability to install apps, and we could audit her phone behavior at any time with no prior notice. There were a few other rules too, but those were the main ones.
About two weeks after she got the phone, I was alerted by a concerned father that I should check the messages that Addi was sending to his son. It had been about a week since I’d looked over things, so we took a look. Wow, we were shocked at what we found.
Before I continue, let me be clear that we don’t expect our kids to be perfect. I know what I was like when I was their age, and I know what the other kids at school were like. I’m sure things have only gotten worse since then. However, we do have high standards for our kids.
To be honest, the things that she was saying to the other boy were not good. She was getting way too emotionally attached to him way too fast. However, that turned out to be the least of the issues. Without going into too much detail, I’ll just say there were several text message threads with her other friends that were extremely inappropriate. She and her friends were using language that we don’t allow in our family, and there were other innuendos being tossed around as well. It was really bad.
After dinner that night I told Addi that I needed to see her phone. More quickly than I thought possible, she began deleting text threads. In a matter of 5-10 seconds she deleted all but one of them. Fortunately, we had thought ahead and had pictures of all the things she’d just deleted. Unfortunately, her decision to try and cover up her text messages only compounded the mess she’d gotten herself into.
We sat down with her and talked about the rules of her phone, the rules of our home, and the way we expect her to conduct herself. She acknowledged that she’d violated all of those expectations. We let her know that we had just given her the phone as an expression of her growing maturity and the trust that she’d earned with us, but now she’d lost all of that. We also talked about how trust is harder to earn back after it’s been lost.
We grounded her from her phone and her friends for the whole summer.
Surprisingly, she didn’t argue. She didn’t get upset. She didn’t raise her voice. And she didn’t tell us how horrible we are. She didn’t like the punishment, but she knew that she’d messed up big time.
Later in the summer we forced her to go to church camp. She did NOT want to go. Her biggest objection was that she would be attending with a church other than our own. Our church is very small and we don’t have a big enough group to go to camp. She had visited the other church a few times, but she really didn’t have any friends there. Kari and I have a lot of friends at that church, but Addi didn’t like it.
Kari and I told her about the great experiences we’d each had at church camp and I even told her about all the times I’d gone to church camp with my grandparents church when I hardly knew anyone. That didn’t matter. She didn’t want to go.
Well, as I said, we didn’t give her a choice, and off she went. Five days later she returned. When we went to pick her up, she ran up to me with a massive smile on her face and begged me to let her go again next year. She made some great friends that week, and she’s begged us to take her to that church every Wednesday since.
As the summer came to a close, we asked both kids what their favorite part of the summer was. Addi said her favorite thing was church camp.
Here’s What I Learned:
A few days later, Addi admitted that when we first asked her what her favorite part of summer was, her initial thought wasn’t church camp. What she said next shocked us. She said that her true favorite part about the summer was getting grounded from her phone!
She then went on to tell us that being away from the phone and her friends helped her realize the bad choices she had made. She said that most other times when we ground her, she thinks we’ve made a bad decision, but when we grounded her from her phone, she knew we had a good reason to.
Her perspective was quite different than it had been earlier in the summer. One of her other friends also got busted when her parents discovered the text messages. However, she only got her phone taken away for a couple of weeks. At the time, Addi thought that we were being too hard on her. So it was quite refreshing too hear her changed perspective near the end of the punishment.
As I said at the top of the episode, Kari and I are not even close to being perfect parents. We try our best, but we screw up plenty of times. Fortunately, this time it appears we got it right. We gave Addi the guidelines for what needed to be done to get her phone back, and she worked very hard to earn it back. When we sat down with her and went over all the rules and expectations again, she was very receptive and seemed to have an added appreciation for the privilege of having the device.
One of these days in the not to distant future our kids are going to leave our nest and fly away. When they do I want them to be ready to make the world a better place. After this summertime lesson, I have a little bit more hope that we might just be succeeding.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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