My daughter recently passed her tenth birthday. 

Welcome to the Tweens!

There are, certainly, some timeless elements of raising a tween. The moodiness, the acting like a sassy teen one moment followed by curling up into a ball bawling over a broken toy. 

And the body odor, which they are only occasionally aware of, and almost never inclined to do anything about.

However, there are additional aspects of raising a kid here in the 2020s that aren’t quite immortal. Back in the 1980s, my mother never had to worry about me messing up her Netflix queue.

In a nutshell, kids need to have tech available to them these days. But kids are also too young to sign up for their own accounts on a lot of said tech. Sure, we can lie on some things, but not as many as you might think. 

Which means we have to sign them in as us. Which… kinda defeats the purpose of not allowing kids to sign up for their own stuff?

We ran into this issue on our recent cruise. Kids under thirteen couldn’t have their own log in on the cruise’s app, so we had to sign her in as me. But I was also signed in as me, so while she or I could text Wife, we couldn’t text each other. 

In addition, the cruise had an area set up for young kids, and it had activities set up for teenagers. For tweens, it had… the ability to check themselves in and out of the kids area. 

I guess they’re called Tweens for more reasons than one. They’re the Taint of childhood. And they smell like it, too.

I mean, you’ve got to be eighteen to enter into a binding contract, right? So thirteen shouldn’t make much difference from ten. If she violates those all-important terms and conditions, they ain’t coming after her whether she’s nine or thirteen or seventeen. 

I’ve known we’re in that Brave New World for a few years. One time I took Daughter to curling. She throws two or three shots then decides she wants a corn dog. I was about to give her a twenty when I remembered they don’t accept cash there. 

I gave her my card, because it’s not like anyone requires signatures anymore. It’s basically the same as when our parents wrote letters saying the liquor store could sell us beer because it was for them. (The 1970s were real, folks!)

I think I might’ve suffered twenty heart attacks in the five minutes she was getting her corn dog. Because Daughter ain’t the best at holding onto things. If I had given her a $20 bill and she set down the change somewhere and walked away, I’m out maybe $15. If she does the same with my debit card, I’m becoming besties with a Nigerian prince 

Last summer, we went to a baseball game in Colorado and were faced with a similar problem. She wanted water. Since there was no way we were letting her to weave in and out of a stadium crowd with our plastic, I went to get her stupid fucking water. What happened while I was standing in line? The Angels hit back-to-back-to-back home runs!

We got her Greenlight, which is basically a debit card that we can pay her chore money into. Anyone who raised a child before 2010 thinks we’re crazy to get plastic for our child, but think long and hard about how little you spend cash.

We still won’t let her go out with it. At some point, she’s going to need to carry it on her own. Keys, too. But she’s not there yet.

When she saves up for something, we give her the card to make that one purchase, then it stays with us. Half the time, we pay for it, then transfer the money back to us. Just like Venmo, which I just checked and, magically, it has a minimum age of thirteen. And since it’s tied to bank accounts and email addresses, it’s not like we can lie about her age, then readjust it in three years. 

I dropped her off for a birthday party at Round Table recently. Here’s one of those time-honored Tween Parent traditions. Most events, you have to play wait-and-see to figure out if it’s a drop-off or a parent-stay event. I would’ve been the only parent staying, aside from the birthday girl’s, so I left.  

Then I remembered she probably needed money, so I stopped by an ATM because I didn’t have any on me. It was for air hockey and the claw machine and such so, even if she took her Greenlight card, it wouldn’t have been useful. I showed back up ten minutes later to give her cash. Then she asked if I could go get change for it, because she didn’t want to have to engage with the cashier.

Ah, Tweens. The activities and opportunities have expanded, but the responsibility has not.

Again, most of these situations would’ve been the same when my parents was raising me during the Reagan administration. Sure, they might not have needed to break a twenty, or to get a fresh twenty, just to get some quarters for video games, but they would’ve gone to get water for me at the ballgame. Or, more likely, a soda because I don’t think they sold bottled water back then. 

The big change is in the technology space. Everything requires apps or accounts that the Tweens cannot own. 

For the second summer in a row, I’ve made Daughter sign up for our library’s summer reading program. Unlike back in ye olden days, when we just totally lied and turned in a piece of paper with a bunch of “Read 30 minutes” boxes checked, it’s now in an app that tracks the minutes. Of course, there’ still no proof she actually is reading between the two times she pushes the button, but at least it provides a much more accurate time count.

The summer program must be tied to a library card. So last year, and again this year, I just signed in as myself and changed the name to her. No biggie, because it’s not like I needed some stupid external motivation to ensure I do some reading. 

Hold on, let me go check the Kindle Summer challenge. 

This year, they turned the quest into a Dungeons & Dragons-ish quest, where you pick a wizard or a faerie or whatnot and the tokens you get for each task are tied to the character. And once you finish one quest, you can restart as another character. Sounds fun.

The parents can play along, too, the hobbit-looking, Brandon-Sanderson-sounding librarian says. That’s not an insult. If I told him he sounded like Brandon Sanderson, he’d probably spontaneously orgasm.

But… she’s on my account. Can I make two people on the same account simultaneously? No. One person per account. So Wife can play along or I can play along, but we can’t have a family-wide competition. Same damn issue as the cruise.

And again, I don;t see the difference between ten and thirteen. If she loses a library book at any point in the next eight years, they ain’t coming after her regardless of the name on the card. 

It finally came to a head when we got new phones. Daughter’s had a hand-me-down for a couple years now. For the majority of that time, she only used it to download mindless games, but over the past year, more of her friends are getting their own phones, so they text each other. Mainly emojis and whatnot. As far as I can tell, most developmental professional types are saying phones are fine for ten-year-olds, social media is not. Hell, social media probably isn’t a good idea for adults, either. As fun as it is to learn how vapid your favorite celebrity is, a world in which we mostly interact with people who we know and understand might not be a bad prescription.

They still aren’t allowed to have phones at school, but she’s heading into her last year of elementary school, after which I’m sure it will be game over. I keep seeing debates about whether phones should be allowed in schools. L.A. Unified just banned them and Herr Kommandant Newsom thought that sounded like a peachy idea for the whole state so he can run more commercials in Florida about how California believes in freedom. 

Kind of an odd battle to be fighting right now. My district is under the impression it’s illegal for us to ban phones, although I can’t find any court cases to that effect. Guessing there’ll be one the first day L.A. Unified actually tries to implement it. Something about the right to communicate. Besides, if schools are giving laptops to every student, taking away their phone isn’t going to create some utopia where they’re all paying attention. I’ve got students watching unedited Game of Thrones episodes, what the hell do I care if he’s texting someone?

Y’know, we used to pass notes in class, too.

So with middle school coming and any number of other reasons, when Wife and I recently upgraded our own phones, we finally brought Daughter’s into this decade. For the most part, it’s been a success. It’s great for car trips and providing some peace and quiet around the house, because I swear if I have to watch another season of Jesse, I might be committed.

She can also start doing front-end negotiations on play dates so the extent of our social secretarying is getting confirmation from the other child’s parents. You’d be surprised how often they have no idea their own child auctioned off their pool and half their refrigerator.

But there’s some snafus, Unlike the library, where she’s using my account, the Amazon account on Daughter’s phone belongs to Wife. You might’ve had heart palpitations knowing a ten-year-old can go hog-wild on Amazon with no guardrails, but Daughter is either a good soul or not very adventurous. I’m sure that will change at some point and we’ll have to lock it down. Maybe give her her own Amazon account and tie it to her Greenlight card. Except, again, there’s probably some legality behind doing that before she’s thirteen or maybe sixteen. I guess we could remove our own plastic from Amazon and have to enter it fresh each time, but Jesus, who wants to do that? Can you even have a pay-as-you-go Amazon account?

But for now, she uses Amazon responsibly. More responsibly than her parents. Yeah, I know I have ten unread books on my Kindle, I’ve just gotta get that other one. They’re offering double Kindle points this weekend! I have no idea what Kindle points are for, but it’s double! 

Daughter, on the other hand, makes wishlists for her birthday and looks for gift ideas for the two of us, even if we’ll be the ones buying it. That goes back as long as there’ve been gifting occasions. I remember picking out things at K-mart get grandma for Christmas, but I sure as shit didn’t pay for them myself. I only had to wrap them, so she’d know it was truly from me.  

Now, what Daughter should have done when she found the perfect gift for Wife was to text it to me. Instead, she put it in the cart. Makes sense, because that’s what she’s done when finding something she wants for herself. We tell her to look up lunchboxes or some Taylor Swift bullshit. She finds the item she wants and puts it in the cart. Then the next time we’re ordering toilet paper or toothpaste (but not Kindle books, because those are, of course, one-click buys), her item is sitting in our cart and we can decide whether to add it or save it for later.

Same way it worked at K-mart in 1985.

So she saw a shirt that she thought would be great for her mom’s birthday. And she put it in the cart. Of her mom’s Amazon account. 

Then, when Wife said she was going to order something from Amazon, Daughter piped up with that eternal cry of the Tween and beyond: “Don’t look in there!”

There’s got to be a better way.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to send some account info to my Nigerian friend. He swears he’s going to send me some tasteful nudes of Queen Victoria.