Dear Parents Whose Children Own iPhones,

On behalf of teenagers working to get that new iPhone, I just wanted to let you know that you have revolutionized the meaning of childhood memories.  Thanks to your very generous gifts to your children for Christmas, they now think that socializing with family means asking where they can charge their iPhones or if they can have the WiFi password. While you might consider your children more civilized because they own the latest gadgets, we broke college students are glancing over your children’s shoulder as if we were still five, trying to suppress our wanting to ask shyly, “Can I play with it for a sec?” Gifts like that are so much more valuable to us because they weren’t just given to us for eating our veggies at dinner, or for actually being able to spell the word “veggies.”

Now that I am an adult and actually have to engage in adult conversation at family parties, when I get bored I try to figure out what the young rascals in our family might be up to. I think, maybe I can’t hear them because they’re very skilled in the art of hide and seek. Perhaps they went outside to play ding-dong-ditch or soccer in the front yard. But what I always find now are zombies invading the living room couch with heavy eyelids unwrapping just enough to stare at the small screens they hold next to the plugged-in chargers. Aahh…. Childhood memories in the making.

It is amazing how childhood memories have changed drastically in just a decade.  Kids today are lucky. At age four they launch angry birds across a field by just flexing their thumb across a glass screen. I had to fully stand and use all of my body to just kick a ball. I’m sorry! I completely forgot that that object is alien to you now that there is no need for physically demanding toys. I should rephrase that. I savagely kicked a rubber, air-filled sphere around my backyard. Oh how ignorant I had been of how I could have better spent my time.

Owning that technological masterpiece seemed just too good to be true when I was younger. My parents certainly never used that tactic of shutting me up with an iPhone, but now I totally get it. It keeps you from pulling your hair out in the car on their way to school. It is the repellent of your little boy’s constant “why” questions, trying to understand the meaning of life when he is just five years old. Why spend an hour playing catch with him and getting a sore arm the next day when you could just spend five hundred dollars for him to sit in a corner, touch the phone’s screen all day and not bother you? How else would you be able to have time to chat in your friends’ group chat trying to decide on when to meet up for c***tails?

Honey, you spent good money on that phone, so don’t let anyone judge your modern parenting style. Those envious parents next door just wish they were launching an angry bird with their thumbs too instead of helping their lousy kids ride their first bike. Like you, we should embrace the era of booming digital technology through the childhood memories of our future children. Maybe if we’re lucky their first word will be “apple.” And they won’t be referring to a fruit.

With role model admiration,
A Broke College Student That Just Got her First iPhone