The birth of a screen addict: a cautionary tale for progressive, hippy parents

My name is JP McD, and I'm a screen addict. I live for video games. I have no goals in life other than becoming a successful video game player/"Twitch" streamer. To that end I am prepared to live in my parents' basement well into my 40's.

My Conflict: My parents want me to sleep, exercise, eat well, get good grades, go to college and have some sort of a career that doesn't involve video games. They also want me to have friends who do stuff other than play video games.  

This is my dad. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. He is happiest with a drink in one hand and a phone in the other clicking on facebook articles about climate change. His conflict is that he wants everyone to prioritize sustainability, and they are all just going to Starbuck's and scrolling through social media. At the very least he wants them to know what's going on the world.

This is my mom. She started out as a helicopter parent but now all she wants to do is make pottery and run with the dog. Her conflict is that she also wants a clean house and kids who exercise and eat a lot of plants, and she thinks that those things should happen without any further effort on her part. If she's not working or running, she, too, has a drink in her hand. Unlike my dad, she gets her news using the "Peter Sagal filter;" meaning she waits until people are making jokes about it on "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me," the NPR News quiz show.

This is my sister, Steel. She is either Face timing with her friends, doing tik tok dances, or watching rom coms. Here she is balancing a water glass on the shelf of faux ass created by sock-filled booty shorts. Her conflict is that she wants to be glamorous, rich, successful and loved, but she has a hard time leaving the house. I have been unsuccessful in my lobbies for the kitchen to be a twerk-free-zone.

This is my youngest sister, Toby. She is a dancer. She wants to solve climate change, income inequality, and racism. She also wants things new, clean, tidy and aesthetically pleasing. She lives to tattle on me when I'm taking illicit screen time. Her conflict is that changing the world, cleaning/organizing, catching me, and dancing 12 hours a week is too much for an 11 year old.  She constantly makes time-lapsed videos of herself which is clearly a metaphor. She's a wreck.

This is Nola. My mom kept her away from the dog when we first adopted him. Lincoln is a hunter. Someone told mom that she should chill out and let them meet. The plan was that Nola would swat the dog; he'd stay away; and peace would reign thereafter. "Kitty flam·bé Friday" ensued.  Nola was holding her own on the bar stool, but she jumped ingeniously out of his reach to the back of  the stove. In his abject rage, he somehow turned the burners on. Notice the subtly singed and curled whiskers. She looked like a feline Salvator Dali for a month. 

Lincoln also bites people. He loves mom, but he goes after the rest of us, and he will definitely bite any stranger who comes in. This adds to the general chaos of our house, especially because Dad didn't want any pets and is allergic to them, and mom got them anyway. Sometimes I wonder if this is the beginning of the end of their marriage. 

On the other hand, the pets do provide comic relief. They also allow all of us a passive aggressive option for expressing ourselves.

We are in a global pandemic. Most of our social interaction is with each other or on screens which has exacerbated most of the above conflicts. Actually, who am I kidding? The pandemic isn't really effecting us that much; we'd be a mess either way.

My mom caught me playing "Overwatch" while I was supposed to be in my online Spanish class. My teacher, Doctora Ramirez had already given me an Academic Notice for "being distracted in class with colored lights flashing on my face."

I no longer get to sit in the basement doing online school on the gaming PC that I built. Dad took the cord.

If I do online school at home, my dad SHARES MY SCREEN. He intervenes when he sees me off topic

Sometimes I do online school at my mom's pottery studio. She pokes me every time she suspects my interest is flagging or she sees a text or Youtube window open.

I have been lying about my screen time consumption for all of my life. Even with all of the sisterly surveillance, I got away with a lot of gaming and Youtubing.  It was smooth sailing when my parents didn’t understand how "windows" work. For months they’d “catch” me, and I’d deny deny deny. I’d say, “Check my history!” They’d see nothing but Kahn Academy. I’d hit “F3” and my queue of porn and Twitch streamers would pop back into action. It was driving my whole family insane. They’d swear they saw me, but they never had proof.

One night, though, my mom came home from walking the dog. They snuck into the bushes and filmed me watching YouTube through the living room window. If she hadn’t had the video evidence, I’d have gotten away with it, but not only was I caught. I lied.

They say that they are going to send me to Valley Forge Military Academy if I don't get my grades up, start exercising, and actively pursue something other than video games.

They actually took me on a tour of Valley Forge Military Academy. My dad had on a button down shirt instead of a hoodie, and my mom had replaced her yoga pants with a dress and pearls. It was terrifying. 

The tour guide was all decked out in fatigues and a beret. The parents ate up his English accent. He used words like "cadets" "barracks"  "reveille" and "morning calisthenics." Was my mom and dad's rapt attention a charade? ruse? fear tactic? Are they actually going to pull me from my Quaker School and send me to military school to "Forge my Future?"

I was starting to think that I might look good in the uniform, but then my mom asked about their screen policy. The tour guide said, "The lads can go to the office and ring their families on the weekends, but their phones stay in the office in a drawer" One of the other moms said under her breath, "Uh huh...that's what I'M talking about." It was uncanny how much she sounded like Connie, the female hormone monster on "Big Mouth." I don't think her son and I are cut out for this.....Connie doesn't think so either.

To avoid military school I made some promises. One of the things was a commitment to run a mile every day before breakfast

My mom soon discovered, using the security camera, that I was just putting on running shoes and walking around the block and coming back and breathing hard, so now I have to run 1.5 miles with her and the dog. We are usually doing it at 11 pm because I've put it off all day. That woman never lets it slide.

My parents say that it's not the not running; it's the LYING, but they are LYING. They don't have a leg to stand on on the integrity front...Santa, the Easter Bunny? Please

I also committed to doing the Boy Scouts. They are hoping I will learn to have integrity and follow-through. Whatever. I found a few gamers in the troop, so we just talk about video games the whole time.

ALL of my grades are supposed to be above 90% by the end of the term or else I'm off to the Military School. My parents insist that they don't care about grades, but they are lying. (again)

I'm also supposed to help around the house, walk the dog, bathe, brush my teeth, keep my room clean and put my laundry away. 

Shoveling:

Dog walking:

Bathing:

Brushing teeth:

 

Cleaning room:

No one I meet online has to deal with this bullshit with parents. They game all night and get to eat junk food and drink Monster Energy all day. They make so much money streaming that they have Air Jordans and Supreme sweatshirts. My parents don't understand that this is a viable career option. They think I'm an addict and that the ultimate end to this path is a heroin overdose. How did it come to this?

My first pediatrician, Dr. Kersten, told my mom that kids shouldn't be on screens at all before the age of 2. My mom chose this quack because HIS mom was a potter. We kept going to him because he was 6'7" and about 140 lb. Dr. Kersten made Mom feel better that I wasn't even on the height or weight chart for about a year and a half. I was tiny. He said he'd never paid attention to them.

My first sentence was "How many many many feet you meet." It took my parents 2 weeks to figure out what I was saying. I did, in fact, see nothing but feet. Also, I read Dr. Seuss's Foot Book 4 times a day BECAUSE I COULDN'T WATCH "BARNEY" COULD I?

My favorite toy was a rainbow centipede that played, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy", Vivaldi's "Spring", Bach's Solfeggietto, Bizet's "Carmen" and Mozart's Alla Turca, Steel threw it out the window of the Minivan. My mom scrambled to replace it before niggardly Grandma Susie visited and noticed its absence. Sleep-deprived Mom inadvertently ordered the Spanish-speaking centipede. Grandma Susie has always wondered why my sisters and I have always said Bay-THO-ban with a clear Spanish accent.

I went to a Buddhist day care. Ghandi's birthday on October 2 was one of the only days they took off. For almost a year I wore skirts and dresses because we had a whole hand-me-down bag full of them for my sisters, and I liked the way they twirled. Nobody cared.

At daycare we played dress up all the time and talked on fake cell phones. In the afternoons we crafted self portraits from glitter and leaves. No one tried to teach us to read.

At home we read a lot. They also tried to make us play with wooden toys. They are such hypocrites. I've not seen my mom read anything beyond the "Shouts and Murmurs" in the New Yorker in 10 years.

I was completely obsessed with construction. I said the word, "Backhoe" 873 times a day. We sang "The Backhoe Song" every night before bed. It goes, "Uncle Pat gets in the backhoe; he gets in the backhoe and he turns it on." That wasn't the most inspired second line, but a day would not end for my sisters and me without a drunken rendition of "the Backhoe song"

I had never gotten to see the show, Bob the Builder, but Scoop the Backhoe is a main character. My mom's friend, Erica gave me a big plastic Scoop the Backhoe for my birthday. It was my prized possession. At that point the only screen time I'd had was an ancient video about an excavator and a bunch of kids singing a song that sounded like "Frère Jacques" but the words were "I dig dirt."

On my 3rd birthday my mom let me stay home from daycare and watch the Pixar movie, Cars while she prepared for my birthday party. I was so enraptured by the screen that I wouldn't stop the movie to go to the bathroom. I just stood up and peed on the counter. 

It took me a week to learn to read in kindergarten. Mrs. O'Brien told my mom that I was on "a new journey" I was "reading to learn" instead of "learning to read." When mom asked if anyone in class was going on my new journey with me, Mrs. O'Brien said, "no." Mrs. O'Brien also suggested, under her breath, that we "explore our options" rather than stay in the local public school for 1st grade.

My parents had me hang out with kids with like-minded parents regarding screens. Caspar and I were best friends. We did a lot of lego building. We would leave ingeniously placed lego boobie traps all over the floors. Watching hungover parents stepping on legos is super fun. I'd be famous now if I'd filmed them.

After a lot of pleading, we started to have movie night every Friday now that I was three and had handled myself so well with my first movie. (Never mind that my sisters were not yet the requisite age of 2.) 

My littlest sister, Toby, is the one who is the least addicted to screens. She was probably 6 months old when she was propped up between us for her first movie night while my parents drank and pretended not to smoke in our little postage stamp garden.

They somehow won the Philadelphia School District lottery and got me into a science-based charter school. I still read all the time because movie night was only once a week

During the first month of first grade at the new school mom had to call all of the new friend's moms to tell them that it was time for them to have some sort of sex talk with their first graders. I had read The Way We Work cover to cover and was informing people that babies happen when Daddies put their penises in Mommy's vaginas

While I was at school, the girls had a new nanny. Julie was awesome; sometimes I got to be with her as well. She gave us candy and let us play "Candy Crush" on her phone while she snuck out to smoke cigarettes. That started my phone game obsession. My parents did an amazing job at making anything on screens a seductive forbidden fruit.

Even my new friends all seemed to have hippy parents who didn't let us on screens. The outdoors are so boring.

My mom's brother and his wife are NOT hippy parents. They live in Florida. My cousins get to eat NON ORGANIC mac n cheese and ham and peas all the time. We would see them twice a year. Those weeks were bliss. Both families would escape the heat of Philly and Florida and head to New England.

As a compromise between the Floridians permissive screen policy an our draconian one, Aunt Jana came up with the CASH program. We had to do something creative...

We had to do something active...

We had to do something smart....

We had to do something helpful-

Creative, Active, Smart and Helpful CASH

Staying up all night with my cousin, Owen, on his game boy are some of the best memories of my life

Not only would we be up all night playing video games, we would get to watch PBS kids all morning.

Then we'd get to watch Dr. Pohl. Steel wanted to be a vet for a while, so she loved it. She has since found out vets don't make that much money. Now she wants to be an anesthesiologist because she can watch surgeries, see people loopy, and make a lot of money.

We'd get to watch Jeopardy before dinner. 

I'm going to miss Alex.

We'd get to have a movie night so the adults could finally get off of all of their screens and start drinking together.

They would usually drag us to the beach or to her friend's pool. It was agony being sunburnt, covered in sand, and counting the minutes until the parents were drinking and the kids were screening.

My grandmother would spend the entire week shushing us so that she could focus on her online solitaire. She'd say to my mom, "They're in my house! Let them play on screens if they want!"

My grandmother, my aunt, and my uncle would sometimes gang up on my mom and dad. They'd say things like, "You're holding your kids back if you don't let them get acclimated to screens! All of the standardized tests are going to be administered on screens, and your kids will flail!!!!"

My mom would respond, "Oh Please!" and go set up some sort of onerous and messy craft for us to do on the deck. Making spitball guns out of plumbing supplies was OK, but most projects involved shaving cream, wax, sea shells, and essential oils. 

We'd leave the video game oasis in Massachusetts and return to Philly for the rest of the summer

We'd go to camp at the local rec center. You can surmise at this point that most things that happen at rec centers are hellish to me.

I got suspended from camp for a few days. I'd found an old iPhone around the house. I'd taken a picture of my junk and turned it into the screen saver and passed it around the camp. This incident coincided with the Anthony Wiener scandal in which he was caught, as a married senator, sending dick shots to a single 20 year old.

"Well mom, so much for your assertion that I'm holding my kids back by not letting them use electronics! I still haven't figured out how to make an image my screen saver, and JP did it in all of 30 seconds!"

I was born knowing how to optimize an iPhone.

After the rec center camp, we went to an Arts camp which we assumed would be yet another glue, bead, glitter extravaganza.

We turned art camp into "make your own iMovie" camp which meant using the iPad for most of the day. Steel was the one to convince the counselors. She's kind of a bad ass. Since she was 5, no one has said "No" to her.

The, "we're being CREATIVE!" movie making ruse worked at home too. We'd get our grandmother's old ipad and make gory films. 

Using all of the food coloring and every condiment in the door of the fridge to make fake blood was also "creative."

We'd always end up bagging the film to go online and watch porn or play video games. It was great. Our house was "the cool house" for a while in the neighborhood.

Doing things on the computer that elude adults is my gift-as is eating hamburgers as big as my head.

In 3rd grade we started using google docs, so obviously we all had e-mails we could access. The school didn't say we couldn't set up our e-mails and use them. I sent an e-mail to the girl who told Rosie I had a crush on her. 

The dean said had I written, "I want to kill you;" I'd have been suspended. He was very impressed that I'd changed the password on my school e-mail as none of the faculty had managed to do it. All in all, I thought the disciplinary meeting went quite well.

I couldn't understand why mom was so pissed. Mr. Masterson was so complementary, and I didn't get punished. Out of nowhere, she said, "That would have gone much differently if you had brown skin." What a random thing to say.

Even recently at the new, posh school, my MATH teacher couldn't sync all of the computers in class for some online game. No one in the class could. I had to do it. Aren't math teachers supposed to be OK at this stuff? She pulled me out of social studies to do it again for her other class during the period after lunch.

I'm sure all of you parents are wondering why my parents didn't try distracting me from screens with other things, like sports.

They did! My dad was even an assistant coach one year. My nana reminded my dad that he'd pitched a perfect game in Little League once. Dad didn't even remember. He was the quarterback of his 70lb football team and HIS dad was the coach. It was hard for Dad to watch me be so bad at sports when he was actually pretty good at them. 

I heard my mom say that 4 horsemen were going to appear in the sky if I ever caught a pop fly. We quit baseball after 4 miserable seasons

Image: Dad and JP doing karate with Sensei Brandon

My first karate class was with Sensei Brandon. He was super serious. Dad did it with us. It was exhausting, but I liked learning the Japanese.

Sensei Brandon made me get out of the double stroller and push it home. Normally Steel and I would sit on the seats, and we'd make Toby perch on the bottom where you rest your feet. Sensei Brandon wouldn't even let Dad carry my bag.

I had a karate/mindcraft themed birthday party. My dad taped together 60 cardboard boxes that we were to build with, and mom made a papier-mâché punching bag Piñata. We ended up kicking the crap out of the boxes, the pinata, the cake and my sisters. Mom's crafty party ideas always ended in chaos.

We moved too far away from Sensei Brandon's class, so I started doing karate at a place closer to our new home. I got a new color belt every other week. 

It was a karate franchise. We bumped into Sensei Brandon and told him about it. He scoffed saying,"You're doing "pay for trophies karate" now???"

My parents were already experiencing "new karate class sticker shock," but having their beloved Sensei disparage the whole endeavor really curbed their enthusiasm. "Action Karate" ended.

My stingy mom even took us on a couple of ski vacations to see if that would stick. I chose snow boarding with mom. The girls skied. I never got to the point where I could turn on both edges of my board; more importantly, I HATED it.

The nadir of our family's alpine odyssey was renting equipment and buying lift tickets at Vail. My dad, sisters, and I collapsed after 2 runs because we were out of shape and the altitude got to us. 

Next time let's skip the ski part and go straight to the apres ski part. After a flight or two of beer samples, we could count on the parents to hand over their phones to shut us up.

For years Friday night was "piano night." I was good. My rendition of Burgmuller's "Ballade" was a real crowd pleaser.

Madoka taught something like the "Suzuki method." She would come to our house and up to 7 kids would get a lesson, one after another. The moms would sit and drink at the kitchen counter, and the rest of the kids would run around screaming. More often than not, Madoka would need to join the moms for a couple of drinks afterwards

After Madoka had her much-needed beer and left, we would eat and have a movie night. The brawls over which movie we'd watch got bad. When the parents decided to pick the movie to maintain peace, they forgot about the paraplegic/prostitute sex scene in Forest Gump.

The moms let the boys play video games and the girls got to watch Brave every week from then on. No wonder we loved Madoka so much and made her cute birthday cards.

Image: Steel lying down on the piano bench screaming/crying

Getting us to practice during the week got harder and harder. Steel was brutal. I should thank her for the tantrums she threw. My mom is a crap tiger mom, so they eventually succumbed and we got to quit.

I should thank Lincoln too. He bit Madoka twice. She apologized both times. She was also too nice to make us learn to read music. She would show us what to do, and we would do it all from memory.

The final nail in the piano coffin was that all of us switched to private school. The parents were hoping the new, posh school would give us musical training, Paying Madoka to have us yell and scream and not learn to read music stopped making sense.

Image: JP frantically gaming on his LED surrounded computer

I'll bet you're wondering why I had a "gaming PC" at all with stingy parents who despise screens.

Image: JP doing a powerpoint presentation

They were completely snowed by my power point presentation about the components I'd researched and how I was going to put them together. (The girls did the same thing for a dog which is why we have a dog who bites people.)

Image: JP mom and dad signing his contract

I even printed out a contract for all of us to sign about the financing.

Image: exhausted JP trying to build a computer

Building the actual thing was touch and go. I can be lazy when things get challenging.

Image: a line of baffling computer code

Grandma Susie suggested we embrace my computer literacy and I learn to code. The thing about coding is that it's an awful lot of effort. Things that are challenging and not that fun aren't my jam. I mostly used "doing my coding homework" as an excuse to be screwing around on a computer.

image: JP hiding under the covers with a screen; parent at the door

I get caught on a screen when I've been forbidden to be on one all the time. I have a 3-tiered approach to these situations. First, I lie. If they start to threaten me, I obfuscate. I'll say I wasn't gaming; I was listening to music. I then try to put the blame on them, I say they hadn't made the rules clear. 

Image: The girls screaming at parents

Sometimes the girls will come to my aid. Steel will accuse them of creating my screen addiction by being so stingy about the whole thing. she's very convincing

Image: JP pretending to sleep walk, arms in front of him

Every now and then I'll pretend I was asleep the whole time. I've had marginal success with this approach.

Image: JP crying and pleading

The nuclear option, when I've tried everything else, is telling them I can't control myself and I hate myself and I'm considering harming myself.

Image: Daddy hugging JP

It was nice to be comforted, but then Dad would say something about taking screens away completely. His argument was that you don't give a heroin addict a little heroin. I'd usually dial it back when he started talking like that.

Image: JP in therapy

All of this landed me in therapy for a while. I actually found it sort of fun. As you can see, I enjoy talking about myself.

Image: JP in the Landmark Forum

They made me do this 3-day course for teens called "The Landmark Forum." I came away thinking that I had it pretty good. One girl in my group had been raped. A guy was being kicked out of the house for being gay. The whole thing was about communication and honesty. The positive effects lasted for about a week.

Image: JP pretending to read with a cord poking out of the book

There are so many defunct iPhones in our house "taking my phone away" is an empty threat. I can always revamp one of them. It's the chargers that always give me away though.

Image: JP dressed as a superhero with an "O" on his chest

Optimism is supposed to be a good thing isn't it? Why does it seem to bite me in the ass? I always think, "This time I won't get caught." I'm also hearing impaired, so I never hear them when they sneak up on me.

Image: JP with a B- 

I also tend to be optimistic that I've done enough work or studying to be "done" with my homework.

Image: JP's computer tells him he has 4 billion subscribers

I'm definitely not being optimistic about Twitch streaming. Yeah, I'm not very good at any of the games because I never get to play. Yeah, I don't really have any friends right now because I got kicked out of my friend group for telling tasteless jokes, but it will be so easy to monetize my videos of myself playing games.

Image: a pile of Playboy magazines under the Christmas tree

Speaking of optimism, my parents are holding out hope that a desire to get laid will eventually supersede my desire to play video games. To that end my dad gave me a year of 1981 Playboy magazines that he got off of Craigslist. He wrapped them and put them under the Christmas tree. What kind of parent does that? He said it was mom's idea. A lot of hot girls are into gaming. It's not 1981 anymore.

I can see how this is going to end very clearly.

For more titles by the same author search:

The birth of a cake eating Twerker: a cautionary tale for "body positive" organic farming parents

Lincoln Tails, the birth of a Viszla rescue gone awry.

My way and the wrong way, the birth of an entitled control freak a cautionary tale for exhausted parents who should have stopped at TWO children.

How to avoid financial success despite having any Ivy League education

You might be thinking that all of this is a good sign and that I'm developing another passion. Now YOU"RE being too optimistic. My mom bribed me with SCREEN TIME to write every line you've just read and sketch every drawing.