On Demand World

To my son Tommy,

This morning before school, you were once again in your "morning" mood.  I had the Sprout channel on to ease you into wake up and no matter what was on the boob-tube you weren't happy.  You decided you wanted to watch some specific show called 'Noodle and Doodle' and were quite demanding.  As far as battle of wills went this morning, you lost.

I could have easily gone through the list of the DVR and found an episode of this show.  If we hadn't saved a previous episode, I am sure I could find it online or on-demand.  But I decided not to do any of those things.  I called on a daddy's prerogative to be a bit of a prick.  Though it would be easy to give you what you want, I decided to not let you have your way and learn to deal.  Even if you had been pleasant about your "demands", I would still have just made you watch what was on at the moment rather than what you wanted.

I won't go into some long tirade of how, when I was young, we couldn't fast forward through commercials and we would have to actually wait to the allotted time for a show to begin.  I won't explain how we sat listening to the radio for hours on the end just to record our favorite song on some cassette tape and hope like all get out that the DJ didn't screw up our recording with a bunch of talk over the beginning or end.  I won't even begin to explain such silly things as waiting for a VHS tape to rewind before you watched the next movie.  I understand that things change and technology advances and I am under no illusion that things were better using a huge boombox and a t.v. with a dial. But some things still need to be learned no matter how technologically advanced  we become

In this world today, what we want is at our fingertips. This doesn't allow you much chance to learn patience. It doesn't allow you to learn that you can't always get what you want.  It doesn't allow you that commercial time when you can get up and ignore the t.v. and perhaps some spontaneous conversation would occur or even some spontaneous tickle fights.  Now you can have it when you want it, condensed and commercial free, just because you thought of it and hit a button on your remote or mouse or touched your tablet screen.  It really is a brave new world.  It definitely challenges both today's children and today's parents when it comes to learning or teaching patience and other such character traits that are built by waiting and not always getting what you want.  Hopefully you will realize the lesson before you end up hating your old man.

Sincerely with love from your dad,
Leo