My high school had a setup that I suspect has long vanished — the open campus. In practice, that meant coming and going wasn’t monitored. One could just walk off campus and leave, so skipping school was extraordinarily easy, whether one took a full or a partial day.
Heck, during my senior year, I left after sixth period basically every day since journalism conflicted with one of my AP courses, meaning that I had journalism during seventh period. The teacher didn’t show up because it wasn’t the normal class period, so neither did I — especially since my physical attendance had no bearing on whether or not I submitted my reviews of the latest grunge releases for the school paper (my musical focus at the time was a tad monomaniacal).
Which isn’t to say my friends and I never outright skipped, opting to not even bother showing up before leaving. The open campus still made it easier to avoid detection in those situations. (The fact that we worked in the attendance office made it easier to obscure the record the next day.) For example, if your father saw you at your friend’s house, he could assume it was because it was lunchtime. At least, he could assume that until the school called because you needed to fill out a form for a writing contest you were selected to participate in, at which point your friend’s phone rang.
Were we involved in Ferris Bueller-esque levels of magic and intrigue? No, decidedly not. We were, however, free to learn to spread our wings within an acceptable margin as we prepared to fledge and leave our nests. It was a simpler time. Now, though, kids have no such room to grow. Big Brother is always watching.
There are the apps, such as Life360 (a tool I increasingly think was designed by Satan himself), which monitor movements down to a disturbingly granular level. You can share your location via your phone even without such an app. Should your child not have a smartphone, the data is still watching and waiting to snitch on them. My eldest’s high school lets me know almost immediately if she misses class. The texts and emails arrive almost instantaneously. ELIZA WAS ABSENT FOR …
And it is absolutely awful. I don’t need to know where she is every waking minute of every day. She doesn’t need me to know where she is every waking minute of every day. She needs to know how to be an adult, how to make choices, how to take responsibility, how to break a few rules every now and again and hope she doesn’t get caught, as did generations upon generations before her.
Instead, I get a message: “Can I skip the rest of the day?” And while I appreciate the honesty and deference to my authority, I also resent the fact that the world we’ve constructed expects such a relationship of us. If she’s asking, it’s safe to assume that she’s not going to miss anything crucial by leaving. She’s a responsible kid who manages her schoolwork and job largely without any supervision whatsoever.
It’s something I’m very thankful for, since my approach to parenting is not exactly super hands-on. My operating principle is that I’ll find out if something is going wrong and I need to intervene. Otherwise, she’s on her own. So, if she messages, it’s a pointless formality, one designed to prepare me for the coming onslaught of texts and emails rather than a genuine request for permission.
As such, there’s no avoiding it. Being a hands-off parent doesn’t eliminate the concern one has for his offspring, and a surprise absent message would set off some alarm bells, so she alerts me before the fact. This also means, though, that I’m roped into constantly being Big Brother as opposed to just being dad.
It also, though, means it’s time for us to start opting out. I don’t know that I can dissuade my family from using Life360, but I can delete the app. I can choose to wait for a call from the police or the emergency room, as my parents may have done on more than one occasion, with the full understanding that simply knowing where she was before such a call was necessitated would not have prevented the necessity. I can choose to accept the reality that she’s a whole free person and not a digital pet I can electronically cocoon in an electronic forcefield for the rest of her life.
In fact, this is something we can all choose to do. The world shouldn’t be a panopticon, especially since the last time I checked, this is still America. This is still the land of the free, of the brave, of liberty. This is still the place where stupid kids can make stupid, rash decisions, catch fly balls, impersonate the sausage king of Chicago, and steal a car with relative impunity, at least assuming the stolen car belongs to a friend’s father. (Remind me to tell you about the unsanctioned road trip during which my idiot friend and I almost hit a cow in his dad’s convertible Mercedes sometime.)
As such, if my kid messages and asks to skip, I’m always going to say yes. Moreover, as I did on the most recent request, I’m no longer calling the school and checking her out. If she wants to taste the sweet freedom of a day claimed for herself and her idiot friends, cows, and “borrowed” convertibles aside, she can do like her father did and slip out a side door and to the parking lot in a delicious display of youthful exuberance. The world may be trying to take that liberty from her, but as her father, even as a hands-off one, there are some gifts I can still give.
Jesus Christ is King
