Don’t let the cattle lick each other.

Why parenting in the internet age is a wild ride.

You’re on the high plains of southeastern Colorado. You’re about 120 miles into your three hundred mile push from Taos, New Mexico up the eastern cleft of the Rocky Mountains headed toward Denver. This is a worthy job. It’s a job as old as ranching and you feel good about it. Each day of your work you grow more weathered and sturdy.

In Pueblo you get a telegram from your ranch.

Press on to Denver. Don’t let the cattle lick each other!

What started as a difficult gig is now impossible. It’s an imperative from a ranch a hundred miles away and it simple can’t be done. It feels like someone’s just sittin’ back, shooting off arbitrary commands sipping a hot cup of Joe with their country fried steak, and there you are, in the mud and gunk, trying to figure out how on earth to stop cattle from doing one of the many crazy ass things they were born to do.

Follow these instructions and everything will be okay.

The instruction manual doesn’t work.

I hate parenting books. H.A.T.E. The ideas they espouse are more often like political demagoguery – and often full of confirmation bias. I get it. It’s a lot harder to sell a book that says “Hey, this might work for you … or it might not.” Don’t get me wrong. Many of these books are full of wisdom, but when you take wisdom and shout it like it’s holy truth, it ceases to be wisdom, it’s just a printed guilt stick you can use to beat yourself or other parents.

There’s no certainty in parenting. There is no “Do this and you’ll be okay.” The reason your kiddos aren’t born holding a manual of instructions in their slippery little hands is that they are all freaking different. Every. Single. One. Totally different. And your family is your family. So why try and jam square-peg parenting into your triangle-shaped family personality?

You can’t keep the cattle from licking each other.

This sloppy metaphor fits the difficulty and nuttiness of parenting when your kids are being co-parented by YouTube, Cartoon Network, Mine Craft, and their digital friendship with PolyCat4532. How are we supposed to maintain our spot on the horse, wrangling our kids and hoping they still love us when we’re done, or at least that they’ll somehow forgive us one day for the mistakes we made along the way?

It’s metal and signal, plastic and light. There’s no love, no encouragement, no care or kindness. Apps and toys that don’t know my kids. But I love the internet and I want my kids to know and use it wisely — but not be owned by it. This is the challenge.

Here’s what I’m learning along the way.

I’m only as old — at parenting — as my first born son.

I’m ten years old in parenting years. That’s not that long to figure things out. I think about my ten year old as an MVP (minimum viable product). We’re all experimenting together. Relax, I tell myself. Keep going!

Experiment in chunks.

This is something I picked up from working on products. Experimentation is crucial to refinement, but if you don’t commit to an experiment it’s not really justifiable to assess it — so I experiment in chunks of time. Right now we’re trying to only do 30 minutes of digital on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Friday afternoons, and that digital is limited to a group of educational sites or shows. Then on Friday night and Saturday, the kids can double down on Halo, Disney Infinity, or whatever floats their boat (within reason). We try to take Sundays off of digital, rest our minds, and remember the world as it’s been for most of human history. We do things like family drawing time. Sounds incredible right?! Well, it’s just the current experiment. We’re testing it to see if it’s sustainable for us in this season. Someone gets sick, and that’ll throw us off. We have an insanely difficult workday and that’ll throw us off. We just try to get back on the horse if we fall off.

Work with our friends

We’re trying to work with our friends, the families of our children’s friends, to see if we can do some similar things along the way. It really helps when your community has a common ethic or a way of thinking about this. The kids can relate better when they have similar constraints in their lives. Seems like a good idea. Doesn’t always work out that way.

Try some tools

We recently started experimenting with using Circle from Disney. It’s a bridge between your devices and your internet connection (wifi and soon your mobile phone service). It shows you what everyone in your family is doing on their devices and can even add limits to that.

So far it’s been both amazing and frustrating. Amazing because it adds a layer of transparency into who’s on what devices for how long, doing what. It’s really detailed. Frustrating, because it can also show me that transparency and if I give Circle the option, it can even cut off the internet at a certain time to hold me to some self-imposed constraints. I actually have to abide by the ethics I throw at my kids. Still, I think Circle is definitely worth a try — and they are constantly updating and adapting their service.

It’s the wild west

I think this is all just getting started for us. So far, I’m not trying to keep the cattle from licking each other. Instead, I’m gently steering my little calves as they explore a wide range of wonders sprinkled throughout the internet. I’m also showing them the tangible beauty of real life around them. I want them them to know how to engage with the things that have nothing to do with bits and bytes. I hope that they will fall in love with a world bigger than these devices.