There is a desktop computer in our kitchen that serves as our family screen. We mainly use it to watch movies and TV shows on Netflix. It’s used as a conduit for moving images so often that I sometimes forget that it’s a computer, so it was a shock when I walked by the kitchen door the other day and heard Evangeline, age 7, say to her visiting friend in a voice of breathless, criminal excitement, “Type in Thomasbeller.com.”
On this particular computer, I have enabled every parental control available that might screen out nasty, inappropriate material. I did this the moment Evangeline started to read, around a year ago. My faith in these automated settings is not total. I’m not naive.
But my own personal website? How had she even grasped that I had one?
I walked away, confused and anxious, trying to review what, if anything, she might find on my site that might be scandalous or damaging. It advertises my books. It links to various things I have written. Then I realized that it wasn’t just the destination that freaked me out. It was the notion of searching. It was the words, “Go to.”
All the promise of interactivity was in those words, and all the peril. I walked back to the kitchen door and peered inside. There, crouched on the floor, sat the two girls, their bodies tense with excitement at the discovery of what glowed before them on the screen.
“Oh my God,” shrieked my daughter, and pointed to my least favorite book cover, which features a cropped photograph of a shirtless boy pulling a measuring tape across his narrow chest. I thought to myself that this response was based purely on the picture, but then I heard Evangeline read the title aloud: “How to be a man!”
“Oh my God!” said her friend. “He wrote that?”
I couldn’t tell if her friend was shocked that Evangeline’s father would write something with such a weird, disgusting title, or if she was speaking with reverence, as though she thought it was in fact the instruction manual that counseled all men on this important matter. Then I realized it was idiotic to be scrutinizing a 7 year old’s questions, looking for meaning, when there was a fire that needed to be put out right now.
I took a step back, cleared my throat, and walked purposefully into the kitchen. The two girls screamed in delight and terror. My daughter jumped to her feet and stood in front of the monitor as though to block my view. Her friend got to her feet and stood beside her.
“Hey guys, what’s going on?” I said.
“Nothing!” they yelled.
“What are you guys doing?”
“Nothing!” they yelled in unison. My daughter beamed at me toothlessly. She is a happy transgressor.
I wanted to talk to my wife so I started up the stairs. Then I thought it would all be too complicated to explain. Husbands bleating out requests for parental guidance from their wives – it’s a waterfall to which I had already contributed enough. This was something I should handle myself. I didn’t want to pass the buck. So I went back downstairs. I could hear the little criminals gasping and trying to suppress laughter as I approached the kitchen. Upon entering I was shocked to see what was on the screen: Babble.com.
They were perusing a list of all the articles my wife and I had written for the Disney-owned parenting site.
This prompted a strange question: to what extent is the material that is written on Babble.com, or on any parenting blog, inappropriate for the children who are the subject of these posts?
“Evangeline!” I bellowed. “I don’t want you looking at that!”
The kids jumped.
“But Daddy,” said Evangeline. “I do it all the time!”
“You look at Babble.com all the time?”
“No, but… I use Google.”
“I don’t care what you have done in the past. I don’t want you browsing the Internet on your own. I don’t want you reading Babble. If you are going to use the computer it’s to watch a movie. Netflix or nothing!”
I pulled up Netflix – with its kid settings – and left the room. I didn’t think I had resolved the matter forever. For one thing it’s very easy for her to switch the user account from her to me on Netflix, which is another way of saying it’s easy for me to forget to switch back from me to her, a fact I discovered by a long drawn out, “wow,” I heard once as she perused titles. On the rare occasions when we watch actual television – somehow, for some reason, she likes football – I spend half the time trying to cover her face from the outrageous, salacious ads. Still, walking out of the kitchen, I thought I had bought myself some time.
About eighteen hours, it turned out.
The next morning was Sunday, and it was exemplary: Waffles, then pony rides, a rendezvous with friends and their beloved dog, Bear, at Boulangerie on Magazine street, where we got fantastic croissants. Then we went back to the house for some Sunday downtime, which involved movies. Or so I thought. Half an hour later, Evangeline walked into the room where my wife and I sat. “Is it true what you wrote about Santa not being real?” she said.
I can still recall the heat in my face on the occasions when, as a kid, I was caught red handed by my mother in some crime. But this was the first time I had been caught by my daughter.
I shot a look of alarm at my wife. She shot one right back at me. Santa is her domain, really, but I had gotten used to the whole idea, and had become sensitive to the unseen dividing line that separates the time a kid believes in Santa from when they do not. When does that happen? And why? A friend once remarked in passing that she learned that Santa did not exist from her older brother. She didn’t say how old she had been when he told her, but the way she finished the remark with the word,”Jerk,” the way she said it with such passion, it was clearly too young, in her opinion. She had been gypped out of some childhood and was still pissed about it 30 years later. It made me a fearful of this premature knowledge.
“What gives you the impression that Santa isn’t real?” I said to Evangeline.
“Because mommy wrote something about how you buy me presents at Christmas and not Santa.”
“And how did that make you feel?” I said, breaking out the psychoanalytic poker player parent costume.
“It almost made me cry,” she said.
I was in a panic. But I kept my cool. The truth is we had already had a dress rehearsal for all this a couple of months ago when she picked up one of our phones and read an exchange of texts in which my wife and I argued, or discussed, how much money the tooth fairy should leave under the pillow.
I had explained that one away by saying we were merely making fallback plans in case the tooth fairy was overwhelmed on that night and couldn’t pick up the tooth. But maybe illusions fall away like teeth – when they are ready to go they go. And yet the damned Internet! It’s both magic and also a sieve through which illusions drain.
“Why did it make you want to cry?”
“Because it meant that I won’t get an iPad for Christmas,” she said. This was a curveball – I hadn’t even known that was her Christmas wish – but I didn’t have time to think about this, I had to stay on topic. I got to work on the myth of Santa like a paramedic with a defibrillator.
“You know how Santa keeps lists?” I said. “Who is good? Who is not? Where do you think he gets his information?” I was on a detour leading towards Santa as the pollster from the North Pole, when I suddenly saw an opening. “What happens if you are bad? What if Santa decides to bring you no presents? That piece was about what to do if Santa shuts you out.”
She stood there for a moment absorbing this rationale about Santa’s back-up plan. It seemed to work. She left the room appeased. Only later did it occur to me that her cheered mood may have had less to do with the reality of Santa, and more to do with the renewed glimmer of hope that she might get an iPad.
The immediate and obvious response to all this has been to change the passwords on our computers and try to monitor her use of them. I also told her she is not allowed to use search, but this is all short-term, really. Some profound barrier reef has tumbled down with the advent of her being able to read. I can try and keep out the sharks, but the eco-system of her consciousness has changed forever, as it should.
When I got around to re-reading that disillusioning essay, written by my wife, I was amazed to see that the reality of Santa was not addressed at all, at least not directly. Instead, its central point was my wife’s wish that she could help our kids circumnavigate every painful experience so that they didn’t have to live through it themselves. Elizabeth wrote about wishing to be able to protect our children from “emotional hurt,” a wish as outlandish as some of Evangeline’s wishes for Santa. The essay’s central theme was the reality of a parent’s limitations in controlling their child’s experience … maybe that was what made Evangeline “almost” cry. Though her explanation about the iPad sounded pretty credible, too.