The joy of telling Siri he’s a dick

When I was young and had my whole life in front of me I wanted nothing more than to be older. To have less life in front of me. I had time to burn. But this was the seventies, the pre information age, so my longing for the years to pass was based only on my desire to be a grown up, to know things, to be able to make decisions and do stuff without asking. Grown ups were cool. Not any more.

My eleven year old son wants to be older, eighteen to be precise, not nineteen and God forbid twenty one, twenty one is old, and old is for old people. What he doesn’t realise though is, compared to me at his age, he is already forty.

When I was a kid if I wanted to know something I had to go to the town library, find it in a book, who does that? My idea of information overload was poking the spilt insides of a dead rabbit with a stick, I got my sex education from Monty Python.

Innocence is simply a lack of information, we keep our children innocent by withholding the truth, by maintaining the fiction, the lie. My son has known there is no such thing as Father Christmas or the tooth fairy for years, he pretends to believe in them not because he thinks the presents and coins might stop but because it makes his mother and father happy.

Parents are an unreliable source of intelligence, when my son wants the facts he asks Google or Siri, the given answer is no secret and he carries the burden of knowledge lightly. He doesn’t know that innocence is eroded, he doesn’t worry about it, that is the job of the grown ups but grown ups rarely understand what innocence is. We think it is a natural state, a blissful state, that it has to be protected at all costs and most typically we always confuse it with sex.

Of course sex is a part of it but only in the sense that sex is information, often information we would rather our children didn’t have. Our response as parents can be to further restrict access, we fear the internet, the perilous undertow but it is the ocean our children swim in. They are fish while we stand on the shore with our fishing rods and keep nets. I have to trust my son not to swim in dangerous waters.

I don’t want my three boys to be men any day soon, I will miss my children but there is nothing I can do about it. My eldest son understands and only wants the best for me, he is kind and patient and teaches me minecraft.