“Mom just texted me,” said Katina.
“Yes?” I said, hearing my wife flush the toilet upstairs.
“Daniel isn’t starting on his Little League team, so she’s convinced the coach doesn’t know anything about baseball.”
“Isn’t Daniel’s coach a former scout for the Yankees?”
“Mom wants you to pitch batting practice and get involved,” said Katina. “You know, do that practical stuff you’re so good at to smooth things over and get Daniel more playing time.”
As a logical man of modest needs, I liked eating dinner with my family and having sex at least twice per month. If the price of that was hosting a Teacher Appreciation breakfast after Mom swears at the high school biology teacher or hitting groundballs to twelve-year old boys, I normally took the good with the bad. Afterall, everything’s a tradeoff.
Then I watched Katina on the couch with her phone. Should Mom and I have been more rigorous about social media? Had tech turned our family into inconsiderate aliens? I mean, who was more important, the person trying to sleep next to you because he had to get up early for a job that paid the bills, or the alcoholic friend of a friend texting parenting advice and gift ideas to you in bed at two in the morning?
“Dad, you okay? You get fired or something?” asked Katina, glancing at me.
“Did you know that teenagers spend eight hours per day or more on their screens,” I said.
“Social media is the crack of my generation, I get it,” said Katina. “But my friends need me. If Sophie’s upset and I don’t respond, she’s like, ‘Katina, where are you?’ Believe it or not, my friends look to me for advice.”
“That’s great,” I said. Holy shit, I thought. People look to my daughter, the one who left the freezer open all night, for advice? I just wanted to raise resilient, frisbee-throwing kids, and they preferred straining their eyes in addictive digital silos. As a parent, it worried me.
#
Mom and I talked it over the next morning.
“It’s a different world than what we grew up in,” I said while my wife sipped her coffee. “All we had to do as kids was eat liver with mashed potatoes and get more tinfoil on the tv antenna.”
“Yeah, I’ve been living out of my parents’ handbooks for years,” said Mom.
“Actually, my parents’ handbook,” I said.
Mom rolled her eyes, but we both understood that we were passing on a world we barely understood ourselves.
“So can we talk about the baseball coach?”
“I’ll volunteer to help with Daniel’s team if you’ll leave your phone in the hall at night when we go to bed,” I said.
Mom looked up and paused. “Let me think it over.”