I Learned To Curse From Al Pacino
A few days ago my thirteen year old son asked if he could take one of our laptops up to his room. My immediate thought was no, simply because it is a rule in our house that no internet accessing laptop goes behind the closed door of one of our children’s rooms. I don’t think I need to explain why, I’m sure many of you have the same rule. The reasons are obvious, especially when one’s children are fifteen, thirteen and ten. We wouldn’t want them having secret chats with strangers or even secret chats with their friends, among other things. That was always the fear with my daughter, who is the fifteen years old. But with my sons, it is different. And at the risk of sounding blatantly sexist, I add another reason for the rule: Porn.
When I was a kid it was simple, you either found your father’s stash of Playboy Magazines or you didn’t. Now my father had no stash. For those of you that know me well you know that my apple fell miles from the tree. But my best friend, well, his father had a stack of Playboys higher than our little ten year old waists (I’m not going to name names, you know who you are). And until we got caught, we looked over and over at each and every picture in every one of those magazines.
I thought of that memory in the few seconds that passed after my son made his request. I have no stack of Playboys. Nobody I know has a stack. What we have is the Internet where every imaginable image we could ever want to see is readily available. So I had to weigh the decision carefully. And after thinking about it for a minute or two, and actually considering the implications of my answer, I said yes. I mean, I didn’t end up being a misogynist, a serial rapist or worse just because I spent a few hours in my friend’s garage with his father’s Playboys. And if I am careful, and I talk to my sons in the right way, teaching them about respect for others and how their interests are normal, neither one of them will turn out that way either. At least not because they spent some time perusing www.boobies.com (don’t bother, it’s a real site, I already looked).
I don’t know what it was he did on the laptop that day, and believe me, I looked. As far as I can tell he was watching old Star Trek episodes on Netflix. But the important thing is that he thinks I trusted him. I say “thinks” because clearly, if I checked up on him, I don’t. And I shouldn’t. I make it a habit, from time to time, to check the browser histories on all our computers. I pick up my kid’s cell phones when they leave them lying around and check their texts. And I make sure they know, if my wife or I don’t approve it, it doesn’t get downloaded.
We made our daughter wait until she turned thirteen before I allowed her to set up a Facebook account. After all, that’s Facebook’s rule so why shouldn’t it be ours. And when she set it up I made sure that I had her password. I helped her set up her privacy settings and told her that if I ever found even one of them changed the account gets shut down. I check that, too.
I do these things because this is what we, as responsible parents, do. I won’t forbid my children from doing these things. That would be stupid. And I don’t want to limit them in any way from discovering things that are considered a normal part of growing up. I don’t keep them from watching violent movies because we talk about how it’s a movie and not necessarily a reflection on how life really is. And I don’t punish them for cursing unless it is in a mean, name-calling or otherwise rude sort of way. Seriously, if my son drops a plate on the floor and it breaks, and he yells “SHIT” then why should I call him out on it? But if he looks at sister and calls her stupid, he’s going to pay for it. When I was eleven, my father took me to see “Dog Day Afternoon”, an R-Rated movie. I don’t remember going to school the next day tossing F-bombs all over the place (okay, maybe a few).
The point, if you haven’t gotten it already, is that it isn’t what our kids watch, play or otherwise discover on their own as much as how we deal with it. Our job is to prepare them, to teach them and to guide them. If we do it right, with love, then we have nothing to worry about. They will turn out to be the people we want them to be. More importantly, they will turn out to be the people they want to be.
When I was a kid it was simple, you either found your father’s stash of Playboy Magazines or you didn’t. Now my father had no stash. For those of you that know me well you know that my apple fell miles from the tree. But my best friend, well, his father had a stack of Playboys higher than our little ten year old waists (I’m not going to name names, you know who you are). And until we got caught, we looked over and over at each and every picture in every one of those magazines.
I thought of that memory in the few seconds that passed after my son made his request. I have no stack of Playboys. Nobody I know has a stack. What we have is the Internet where every imaginable image we could ever want to see is readily available. So I had to weigh the decision carefully. And after thinking about it for a minute or two, and actually considering the implications of my answer, I said yes. I mean, I didn’t end up being a misogynist, a serial rapist or worse just because I spent a few hours in my friend’s garage with his father’s Playboys. And if I am careful, and I talk to my sons in the right way, teaching them about respect for others and how their interests are normal, neither one of them will turn out that way either. At least not because they spent some time perusing www.boobies.com (don’t bother, it’s a real site, I already looked).
I don’t know what it was he did on the laptop that day, and believe me, I looked. As far as I can tell he was watching old Star Trek episodes on Netflix. But the important thing is that he thinks I trusted him. I say “thinks” because clearly, if I checked up on him, I don’t. And I shouldn’t. I make it a habit, from time to time, to check the browser histories on all our computers. I pick up my kid’s cell phones when they leave them lying around and check their texts. And I make sure they know, if my wife or I don’t approve it, it doesn’t get downloaded.
We made our daughter wait until she turned thirteen before I allowed her to set up a Facebook account. After all, that’s Facebook’s rule so why shouldn’t it be ours. And when she set it up I made sure that I had her password. I helped her set up her privacy settings and told her that if I ever found even one of them changed the account gets shut down. I check that, too.
I do these things because this is what we, as responsible parents, do. I won’t forbid my children from doing these things. That would be stupid. And I don’t want to limit them in any way from discovering things that are considered a normal part of growing up. I don’t keep them from watching violent movies because we talk about how it’s a movie and not necessarily a reflection on how life really is. And I don’t punish them for cursing unless it is in a mean, name-calling or otherwise rude sort of way. Seriously, if my son drops a plate on the floor and it breaks, and he yells “SHIT” then why should I call him out on it? But if he looks at sister and calls her stupid, he’s going to pay for it. When I was eleven, my father took me to see “Dog Day Afternoon”, an R-Rated movie. I don’t remember going to school the next day tossing F-bombs all over the place (okay, maybe a few).
The point, if you haven’t gotten it already, is that it isn’t what our kids watch, play or otherwise discover on their own as much as how we deal with it. Our job is to prepare them, to teach them and to guide them. If we do it right, with love, then we have nothing to worry about. They will turn out to be the people we want them to be. More importantly, they will turn out to be the people they want to be.
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