Tag: Stay at Home Parent

Posted in Everyday Life, Life With Kids

Maybe I’m The Screen Time Problem.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

Here’s a short list of common sentences that, when said, doom the speaker to spectacular failure:

“That looks easy enough.”
“Instructions are for people who don’t know what they’re doing.”
“When I have kids, they won’t spend all their time just staring at a screen!”

Every new parent has declared that last one with the kind of foolhardy confidence that would make Florida Man proud.  It’s the “Hold my beer,” of childcare.

I started with high aspirations around screen time and failed miserably, too.  A single cartoon per day just so I had a moment of quiet slowly expanded into 2 per day, then 3.  Then Covid happened and the official household policy became “No, we still can’t do anything.  Go watch 17 hours of ‘Octonauts’ and try not to think about it.”  Between remote work and cabin-bound boredom, everyone in our house started living with a screen from dawn til dusk.  I’m pretty sure my dogs were binging old episodes of “Lassie” after I went to bed.

Eventually we got to go outside again and the screens started controlling our lives a little less. That is, they controlled our lives less until a few months ago when I did something idiotic that restarted the whole problem: after a thousand requests, I finally caved and bought my 9-year-old daughter Sloan a small tablet for her birthday.

I expected her to fall face first into it, which she did, but I was also expecting her to eventually stop using the thing as much once the novelty wore off, which she didn’t.  Not even close.

In fairness, it was a really rough summer for kids activities, so I wasn’t too hung up on her spending all day with the tablet at the time.  Like most of the country, Tulsa was dangerously hot, and no one was spending much time outside.  It’s not like there was a plethora of better outdoor options for her, particularly since Sloan shares my DNA and is therefore able to get sunburnt at night under a heavy cloud cover.

…But now we’ve reached the point where I’d prefer she chance it on the sunburn, because this new screen has introduced a deluge of just the worst content.  Stuff that made me realize that the half-hour toy commercials masquerading as kids’ TV that I grew up with never went away, they just changed shape. Also, they moved to YouTube, which feels way worse, but I can’t put my finger on exactly why.

I’ll admit there’s great content for a kid to find online.  There’s art apps that really bring out a kid’s creativity, science shows that put Bill Nye to shame, games that teach while still being fun, and more.

…But there’s also the other stuff.  Once you have a kid with a tablet you learn just how much digital detritus is out there that see kids as an audience with poor sales resistance and low standards for quality. 

Endless games designed to trick kids into making microtransactions?  We’ve dealt with those.  Unboxing videos funded by toy companies?  Yup, those too.  Reaction videos TO reaction videos?  Nobody at any age needs that in their life. I don’t know what the sales gimmick of terrible kids’ songs with sped up vocal tracks is, but can’t imagine the intentions of whoever made “It’s Hailing Taquitos” are anything less than sinister.

If I have to have this in my life, you do to.

So between the unhealthy amounts of screen time and the influx of low quality media, I think the only thing that’s keeping me from just yeeting Sloan’s tablet down a well is that I’m absolutely no better about my screen use than she is.

I’m not proud of that confession, but yeah: everything she does, I do too.  Head constantly buried in a screen?  I do that.  Playing mobile games designed to show me commercials every few minutes?   Gonna plead guilty to that one, too.  Watching reaction videos to reaction videos?  No…but reading think pieces about other think pieces probably doesn’t put me in any position to be critical of their video equivalent.

Plus, unlike Sloan, I’m on social media, which my wife and I at least had the forethought to prohibit.  Comparing a few kids’ mobile games to Twitter and Facebook is like comparing the energy you get from a sip of herbal tea versus chugging a Big Gulp cup full of cocaine.  It’s digital addiction on a whole other level.

What kind of position am I in to tell her to put down the tablet if I’m saying it with a smartphone in my hand?  When I was a kid, a favorite saying of adults was that TV and video games would “Rot your brain.”  If I say that to Sloan about her tablet, what am I implying about myself?  Clearly, so long as she sees me with my nose buried in my phone, I don’t actually believe what I’m saying.  That’s no way to teach positive habits.

Maybe the problem isn’t clickbait videos or shady apps; maybe the problem is me.

I don’t intend to give up my smartphone, and I’m not implying that you should.  What I am admitting, though, is that my kids are going to take a lot of their cues about how they interact with technology from me.  Teaching my kids about healthy limits probably involves a lot more teaching myself healthy limits than I’ve wanted to admit.

…That and maybe issue a blanket ban on songs with sped up, autotuned vocals, because if I hear any more of that chipmunk voice I’m gonna be ready to dismiss all of recorded sound as a failed experiment.

Posted in Life With Kids

I Am Drowning In Childhood Keepsakes.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

I’m no stranger to playing the Tooth Fairy.  Granted, the costume would fit me a little weird, but as to the actual act of replacing a tooth with two dollars without waking the kid up, I’m a pro.  But there’s one finer point of playing the tooth Tooth Fairy that’s eluded me until now, and I finally want an answer:

What the hell am I supposed to be doing with all these teeth?

Currently, I have a baggie containing my 8-year-old’s upper right incisor stashed in a desk drawer.  I’m telling myself it’s only there temporarily, but that implies I have some grander design for the tooth.  I do not.  Sloan, likewise, has informed me that the corresponding tooth on the left side is also really loose.  By this time next week, I expect to have paid 4 dollars for used human body parts (maybe earlier if her school has another mandatory loose tooth extraction event, more commonly known as ‘Dodgeball’).

I really have no clue what is expected of me every time I come into possession of another one of her teeth.  I’ve thrown away a few and felt absurdly guilty about it.  “This is your little girl’s central incisor!” my inner monologue seems to shout at me, “Don’t you want to stash it away forever to remember this moment?!  Don’t you want to spend 275 dollars on a gold trimmed keepsake box like some kind of medieval reliquary displaying the toenail of St. James?”

Seriously: $275.  The same place also sells a 2 inch porcelain Noah’s Ark toy that costs as much as my first car.

But for all that guilt, do I really want to keep these things?  Will I ever get out the pouch of loose teeth that I’ve kept like some kind of rag-and-bone man to coo adoringly over them?  I can’t really see myself ever doing that.  Maybe if it were the little stuffed Clifford doll that she took everywhere as a toddler I could; that’s a relic of early childhood with a lot of emotional history attached.  I don’t feel that way about her second bicuspid.

Of course, the whole question of whether to keep the teeth is just one outgrowth of the fact that none of us parents seem to have any clue what we should or shouldn’t be keeping.  Forget just teeth; anything that spends more than 5 minutes in the kid’s presence feels like there’s some pressure to keep in perpetuity. 

Baby booties?  You’re supposed to keep those, apparently.  Baby blanket?  Store that thing forever.  Drawings and crafts?  

Dear god, where do you even begin with the drawings and crafts…? 

I have like 3 banker boxes worth of drawings sitting in my garage, plus smaller caches of rumpled, doodled-on paper scattered throughout the house.  None of these drawings will ever get looked at again, but for some reason it seems important that I keep them.  It might just be easier for me to pre-shred them and make mouse nests out of the remains myself. 

It’s not just vague guilt keeping me from tossing this felled-redwood worth of paper into the trash, either.  Kids also seem to have a sixth sense for the location of every doodle they’ve ever produced, and will guard this mountain of crumpled printer paper like some kind of dragon that just raided an Office Max.

At least the drawings can be stacked; it’s the crafts that I struggle most with.  The crafts take up 50 times as much space, break any time they’re touched, and shed a trail of beads and sequins like a bedazzled golden retriever.  Once the kid discovers those craft chests you might as well just accept that your entire house is going to look like a parade float just exploded and throwing away any spec of it will be met with resistance.

This kit contains roughly 2,000 pieces and is somehow capable of producing 3,000 things that you’ll be expected to store.

Now that my younger daughter is beginning to reach drawing age, I’m worried that it’s either time to make some major cuts to what I’m willing to store, or just accept that my new role in life is guardian of an ever growing stockpile of barely remembered keepsakes.  I’ll definitely need another fridge to hang all her best artwork on, and possibly a second garage for the rest.

…Anyway, my kid just walked past chewing gum, so I probably need to go hit an ATM before the end of the day.  All these teeth aren’t gonna pay for themselves.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column

Posted in Life With Kids

“Dad, The Couch Is Upside Down.”

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

Let’s review Greek mythology for a moment:

King Sisyphus died, tricked his way out of Hades, and came back to life again. Twice.  Then he died a third time and, much like a good arena rock band, called it quits after the second encore.  As punishment, Zeus sentenced him to endlessly push a bolder up a mountain.  When Sisyphus was almost at the top, he’d slip, the boulder would roll back down the bottom, and he’d start all over again.  Repeat forever.

I bring this up only because I think that fate read a little differently in ancient Greece, an era when laundry was generally cleaned on the same schedule I use for changing the battery in my smoke detector.

My dishwasher is now running for the second time today and somehow the sink is still full to the brim with dirty plates.  Also, there’s 3 loads of laundry to be folded, I need to go grocery shopping, and the kids’ room is so messy it could probably qualify for international relief aid.  I’ve done all these chores in the last 48 hours, but somehow they went from ‘finished’ to ‘alarmingly behind’ without a step in between. 

Is it too late to get set up with a nice rock pushing gig?

I knew that the chores would be pretty intense when I became a stay at home dad, but I don’t think I realized just how intense a mess two kids and a cluttery spouse can produce.  I pick up the same dozen stuffed animals so many times in the course of a day that if my toddler had a Chucky-style haunted doll that was just walking around the house on its own, I don’t think I’d notice.  If it ever did any creepy stuff, I’d be too focused on cleaning up after it for the scare to sink in.

“Somebody wrote ‘Revenge never dies’ on the mirror AGAIN?!  I’m gonna run out of Windex before the end of the week at this rate.”

“It’s playtime… I said, ‘It’s playtime‘ … It’s playt–HEY, PUT THE LAUNDRY BASKET DOWN AND PAY ATTENTION!”

Today is the last day before the kids go back to school after Christmas break, and looking around my house feels like I’m getting ready to put post-World War II Europe back together.  The buildup of clutter seems almost unreal.  There’s clothes in the laundry hamper I haven’t worn since the Bush administration.  I think there’s a sweater in there that might’ve drifted in from an alternate dimension.

I honestly don’t know how other people keep their living spaces in order beyond just staying on top of basic chores.  Forget window-washing and yard work; I struggle enough just to keep everyone in clean clothes and eating something besides a diet exclusively consisting of Pop Tarts and Lunchables.  …Emphasis on ‘exclusively,’ by the way; I’m in no position to badmouth a Pop Tart.  I’m just satisfied if I can serve at least something in the course of a day that didn’t come out of an industrial fabricator.

How do people find time for stuff besides the baseline, though?  Like, where does the time and motivation for yardwork come from?  My neighbor across the street has 2 kids under 8 and still finds time to rake 2-3 times per week.  By the time I get down to raking on my to-do list, my trees will all look like the gray stumps dotting that sad, barren wasteland from “The Lorax.”

On the far end of town, untouched through the years,
the leaves on Matt’s lawn are piled up to your ears.

It’s not from a lack of desire, either.  I like having a clean, orderly lawn.  I like having a fridge with space for groceries instead of just old takeout containers and like 30 varieties of hot sauce.  I like a vacuumed floor.  Hell, I LIKE VACUUMING.  It’s quick, easy, it makes the dog go bananas…there’s way worse chores you can get stuck with.

…but even for being quick and easy, it’ll never reach the top of the priority list faster than kids can create emergency cleanup jobs.  Ditto the raking.  Ditto cleaning out the fridge.  A bored kid with a box of art supplies will always create a better mess.

“Dad, I was painting a picture for you and all my paints fell on the carpet.”
“Dad, I knocked over the kitchen trashcan and now there’s garbage everywhere.”
“Dad, the couch is upside down.”

That last one isn’t a joke. That happened.  I went to the bathroom, and when I came back my daughter (6 at the time) was sitting astride the defeated corpse of my couch watching cartoons.  She didn’t even offer an explanation, just “The couch is upside down.”  No details.  No preamble.  Just a simple, emotionless statement, like a column of smoke announcing the election of a new pope.

Maybe school resuming tomorrow will open up enough time to beat back the mess a little.  I’m skeptical, but not totally counting out the possibility.  Maybe I’ll fold all the clothes, wash all the sheets, sweep the tile, vacuum the carpet, and carry all the scattered toys back to their rooms of origin.

…But the perfect Marie Kondo house isn’t happening.  I won’t reorganize my chaotic kitchen cabinets.  I won’t box up all the kids clothes that don’t fit anymore.  My closets will stay disorganized, my fence will remain unpatched, and the mice in my garage will all look like the old rat from “The Secret of NIMH” before I ever get out there to set up traps.

“Our legends tell of peanut butter atop boards of death, but none still live who have seen them.”

I don’t know if I’m just way worse at keeping a house than everyone else, but I honestly suspect the rest of you are in this boat, too.  It’s probably easier to hide if you don’t write a column on the subject.  I just wanted to offer a message of solidarity and say that you’re not the only one struggling to keep-

…hold that thought, I gotta roll: I think I just heard a couch flipping over.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.