Well. I had the “talk” with my daughter.

Nope, not the “talk” you might be thinking of. Social media. Instagram. Facebook. Texting. Snapchat. Twitter.  Dangers and benefits. Oh, and she’s only ten. All I wanted to do was call my mom for advice and then it hit me. My mom never dealt with these issues when I was younger. If you are in my age group, you’re probably going to come to this very same realization at some point. Our parents can recall slow dial up connection and call waiting and the importance of teaching us patience. Or how frustrating it was when they had an outdated encyclopedia for us to do our research papers. Times have most definitely changed. We live in a world where information is at our fingertips and it’s super fast and it’s a very “now” mentality. Terminology is vastly different. Our parents taught us about an index and table of contents and glossaries and we are now teaching our children about Google and Siri and Dictionary.com. We also grew up in a world where if we hurt someone’s feelings, we would walk up to them and apologize, and see the hurt in their eyes. Now our children are learning how to smooth things over by text and cute little emojis. Technology is not slowing down and I’m quite alright with moving along with the trends, but it’s seriously insane having these conversations with my daughter. Sometimes I wish I could just avoid it all and send her a text.

I like to think of myself as an old soul. I love the feel of a book. I like flipping through the pages and feeling the history beneath my fingertips. I like hand written thank you notes. I like to look at someone in the face while having an argument or a deep meaningful conversation. I want to laugh with someone, cry together, and hug it out. I sort of feel like the younger generation is losing out on that a little bit. Now, I’m totally making generalizations here, and I understand that. I can think of at least ten friends of mine who raise their children without iPads and video games and television and they homeschool, and I respect that fully and completely. I work full time, I’m a single parent, my daughter has been in daycare since she was little and has always been in public school. So I’m just speaking to my life and trying to figure out a healthy balance. When she was little, she never needed a copious amount of toys. I never had to bring a bag full of toys and blankets and snacks every single place we went. She adapted to her surroundings and she really just learned how to occupy her time absent of materialistic items. Over the past several years, she has become accustomed to a more technology advanced lifestyle. Yes, that’s a fancy sentence and I probably could have just said that she watches a lot of television and plays on her tablet and some days would rather post selfies on Instagram than go outside and ride her bike. Anyways, I learned quickly after she graduated 1st grade that I would need to keep up with the latest and greatest electronics so that I could keep up. She is now in 5th grade, and they learn on tablets and computers and teachers reference apps to download for extra practice. And thank God that I follow her elementary school on Facebook and Instagram, otherwise I wouldn’t even remember that there was a staff development day or parent teacher conferences. Don’t gasp. I’m not the only one who forgets.

Social media is prevalent these days, not only in school but in business, government, law enforcement, you name it. Every single organization is utilizing it because it’s inexpensive, and it’s the quickest way to relay a message to the public. It’s also the quickest way for a seemingly innocent comment to be misconstrued. Hence the “talk” I had to have with my ten year old. I allow her to have an Instagram account because it’s set to private and I monitor it very closely. I approve or deny any friend requests she receives. I can see every picture she posts, and I can see all of the comments her friends make. I thought it was as simple as that, but I quickly learned otherwise. I can’t see comments she makes on her friends pictures and I also didn’t know that you could send pictures directly to someone or a group of people and have offline conversations. Not that my daughter was sending or receiving questionable pictures. Her friends would send pictures of their family dog or pictures of some One Direction poster in their room. A comment was made about somebody’s looks because ten year olds don’t have filters like adults do, and it hurt one of her friends feelings. The second I mentioned it to my daughter, she felt remorseful, and I followed that up with a lengthy discussion about the dangers of social media. And that was followed by me deleting her Instagram app from her phone. Not necessarily as punishment, but because she isn’t fully mature enough to understand that words stick. Especially when they are typed up and posted online.

Although my daughter has lost her Instagram account for the time being, it doesn’t mean I don’t talk to her about it regularly. We have a tendency to become pretty brave behind our computers. We type away with our fast little fingers and hit send and we walk away. We don’t give a thought to that passive aggressive post and the many lives we have actually disrupted. It’s not tangible. It’s so easy to delete friendships on Facebook and just as simple to unfollow someone on Instagram. I don’t find that to be clever, actually. I think it’s far more brave to look that person in the eyes and explain to them why their friendship isn’t worth it to you anymore. I’d be willing to bet most of us these days would find that to be pretty daunting and quite difficult to do, and quite frankly, we probably wouldn’t even do it. While I’m a huge fan of social media and use it on the daily, I feel quite fortunate that I was brought up more than half of my life without it. One day, my daughter will utilize social media and far surpass my little bit of knowledge on it. I am absolutely confident that she will be teaching me new things on a consistent basis. In the meantime, she can enjoy being ten. She can make new friends, she can work it out in the playground, ride her bike, and enjoy reading a book from the glow of a lamp vs. the glow of a computer screen. She can get lost in the laughter between friends and not caught up in reading between the lines of some silly online banter. We could all benefit from that, actually.