When Will My Son Learn….
…that he can not get away with anything behind my back. he seems to think he can outsmart me when it comes to technology. So, for Christmas, his grandmother bought him an Anki Cozmo smartphone-controlled robot. So we gave him an old Samsung Galaxy S4 that we have laying around to control the Cozmo, and subsequently completely forgot about him having it until a couple of days ago.
What tipped me off that he was getting up to no good was that he didn’t want to get up for school in the morning after the festive holidays. That’s when I remembered that he had the phone and given that he had been busted multiple times before for playing games and watching YouTube videos when he thought we have gone to bed, it didn’t take much to put 2 and 2 together to work out what was happening.
So, this morning after he had gone to school, I went into his room and took the phone, which was attached to my charger that had gone ‘missing’ and headphones. I clicked ‘home’ and was presented with a PIN locked screen; clearly an attempt to hide what he had been up to, unsuccessfully I might add.
My son does not have the password for his Google account, so I simply went into his account on my PC and could see everything he had been up to. Including the comments, he had made on other people’s YouTube videos, some of which were wholly inappropriate plus all the times and dates he was watching YouTube videos, some as late as 3am on school nights, 3am is too late any night, let alone school nights.
He literally just got his internet and game privileges back 3 weeks ago after the last time he decided to ignore our wishes and here we are again. Now, he has nothing, I have blocked Internet access to his ROKU box and Blu-ray player on the router level as both allow him to access YouTube. Obviously, there will be no access to his laptop either, I hope the extra hours he snuck was worth losing his privileges.
Update [Jan, 18 2017, 08:31]: In addition to his defiance described above, he also is back on the D & F list after just two weeks back at school. All his grades were reset for the 2nd semester and he clearly is not doing the work, he has an F because of overdue assignments. What can I do to persuade him that he needs to do the work? He complains about us getting on him about it, so maybe I shouldn’t? maybe I should just let him fail in life? I won’t reward him for being lazy, he can do the work standing on his head.
Update [Jan, 22 2017, 14:38]: But, wait there’s more, on Thursday I hear my son screaming and laughing like a crazy person, so I go to investigate. I find him with headphones on, listening to his mp3 player and when I tried to see what he was listening to, he blocked me, stopping playback. This was an immediate red flag, so I confiscated his mp3 player so I could listen to what he was listening to and what I found was disturbing, there was a lot of hateful speech, particularly homophobia and profanity.
I’m not sure whether he understands these words or not, these were videogame stream audio, however, I do not want him to be listening to this sort of intolerance and hate speech. Clearly, the wife and I need to do a better job of monitoring his activities, we do not believe or want our kids to be hateful, we believe in and want to teach inclusion for all, regardless of whether we agree or not with their lifestyle.