Steal Dad’s Phone
Padrísimo (adjective) (colloquial) (Mexico) a. great, awesome
Padre, Spanish for father, is one of many words within the magical lexicon of Mexican slang. It means cool. Great. ¡Qué padre! You might say when something is fantastic. Now, when you say padrísimo, it’s even better.
There’s that age when your children question everything. I’m talking EVERYTHING.
How does this work? Why does this do that? What is this? Where is that? And on and on.
It’s adorable really. They’re learning everything they can and we are their prime source of information. And so we respond. Some our answers are true, others are stretched.
For those unanswerable questions, we often have to turn to other sources like the internet for answers. The simple act of turning to the internet, however, has its own risks because it invites kids to do the same. The more they see us on our devices, the more we give them unspoken permission to do it when they are of age.
“Of age” is variable these days, and with the this and every generation to come being digital natives, they will never know life without information at their fingertips.
That reliance on technology is inevitable, and as much as we would like to control it, the padrísimo father might better be served letting the kids adopt technology on their own.
This happened recently with a game my kids spontaneously made up during these dog days of summer: Steal Dad’s Phone. They video recorded an epic chase we had in my attempt to retrieve it. The footage was very “Blair Witch.”
As their desire to keep this game up in the days that followed, matched by my desire to keep the phone out of their hands, I decided to let them self-govern.
I gave them the passcode and instructed them not to delete anything, or keep it on their person. After a while, the mystique of the phone itself wore off and both they and I forgot it.
Problem solved for both parties.
That’s padrísimo.
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Photo by Julia Coimbra on Unsplash
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