Teaching your kids the old-fashioned way

The world today is moving too fast and the first ones to suffer from it are our children. They spend their time in front of a screen instead of learning from their parents.  They are on their phones, or tablets, or TVs,  or YouTube.  There isn’t enough personal time spent communicating with other humans. I read all about this the other day as I ate some chips for supper with my kids in the living room while streaming their favorite show. 

Or it was my favorite show. But we were eating chips. In the overstuffed chair. I think it was their favorite show because I was reading that article, and not looking at the TV screen. But they were kettle chips.  Vinegar and dill, my favorite. And I was in the chair. They were on the couch. Or floor or something

Anyway,  it, the article not the TV,  said that parents need to sit down to dinner with their kids,  which was why I had the kids bring their sandwiches, or chips, or whatever from their room and eat with me as a family. It’s smart.  Has wifi. The TV, I mean. Not the article. So you can stream on demand.  And there is demand, let me tell you.  With my smart phone, and my smart lights that i can dim with an app,  and my smart water heater that i can get alerts from,  or adjust the temperature from an app. That’s how I had my show on it. The TV, not the water heater.

But it said that kids are missing out on fundamentals that we learned as kids due to the fact that our parents talked to us, but we don’t do the same for our children.  So when I was wiping the chip grease off my fingers, I noticed their show was on a commercial, that really weird one with the luxury Car that turns out to be about healthcare, even though riding around in the car isn’t really healthy,  but whatever,  and I told my kids that when I was young,  we had to watch commercials,  we couldn’t just fast forward.  They asked what I meant, because they had to watch the commercials too since the streaming service wouldn’t let us skip them. But then we could record on VHS so we could fast forward past them, but I didn’t tell them because my show was back on.

Anyway, when their show went off I took them out to my truck and told them that it used to be when you locked your doors, you had to hold the handle up, or the lock popped back up when you shut the door.  And if you heard a honk, that meant someone was mad, or going to wreck, or wanted to tell you hi, not just someone locking their doors. I taught them to hold the handle up when they lock the doors, but all they did was complain that the handle pulled outward from the door and you can’t pull the handle out while pushing it closed.  I think that all the screens just clog their minds so they don’t understand old school parenting.

I still make them look and wave whenever someone locks their door.  Some things never change.