Homegrown Appreciation

This past weekend, my son requested that for his birthday (which was over the weekend), I take him and a few friends up to Vermont to our property to hang out. Of course I agreed. I love Columbus Day weekend in Vermont and I thought it would be fun to bring my son and a few of his teenage friends up there. He planned a couple of activities such as a corn maze at the local sugar house around the corner from us followed by maple creamies topped with maple syrup. He also wanted to go bowling on one of the days with pizza for lunch at a bowling alley we found earlier in the summer. I was all in, sounded like a great time to me. So we all piled in the car on Friday with my dog Bernard by my side, trailer loaded with gear, and we were off. Things started off great, his friends got involved, helped out, chopped wood on Saturday morning when we woke up, and at one point they were all reading books at the same time around the campfire.

It wasn’t long into Saturday afternoon before my son’s friends started asking for chargers for their phones and complaining (albeit mildly) about the total lack of service in the valley where our property is located. My son, for his part, rarely had his phone out, urged his friends to put theirs down and engage, and in some ways, acted much more mature than his friends, even though he is almost a year younger than both. As one of his friends put it on Sunday afternoon, “I’m a screenager and that’s the way I am.” Well, there you have it, the addiction playing out in front of me. Temporarily ok without screens, but before long, addiction kicks in and they can’t help but reaching for their phones, playing games, attempting to watch videos, and disengage from reality. They did also converse at length when we were around the fire, but I noticed that as the weekend progressed, their need for screens only increased while my son went for a book, picked it up, and read. At one point on Sunday afternoon when we were all at the bowling alley engaged in, well, bowling, one of my son’s friends retreated to his phone on a table where he was watching a video in between taking his turn on the lane. I was astounded. I knew it was a thing, but to see my son’s friends at the age of 15 so engrossed with their phones was eye opening.

All that compounded to give me a new appreciation of my son. There are times when he will retreat to his room, I assume to lounge on his phone, but there are also many times when he can be found in a chair reading a book. Because I don’t often see teenagers that aren’t my own for an extended period of time, I don’t get to see the extent of their addiction compared to that of my son. I now see that my son really isn’t addicted as compared with his peers. I underestimated his capacity to withhold from the screen and applaud him for keeping true to who he is. Screens will be a part of his life for a long time to come, but I feel confident that if he stays on his current path and resists being drawn in even more to his phone, he will come out as an adult without a serious screen addiction. It is so easy to get addicted, however, that he still must be careful. Regardless, as he is now, I appreciate him and who he is becoming and all that comes from seeing him with his friends and how he actually tries to get them off their screens.