I spend more time these days than I have my whole life just trying to be mindful, non-reactive, introspective and to keep my awareness of the futility of the little annoyances in perspective. And then he goes and removes the ‘OurPact’ device management on his phone in response to it automatically going into restricted mode after 10pm.
He called me about it last night at 10.02pm, with his typical tone of irritation and resentment. He was pissed off because it shuts off the camera, which it does because I set it up to turn off FaceTime and the OurPact team is unable to change that, technically, it seems. I wrote to them about it and confirmed a while back. I even installed and tested some 3rd party camera options and confirmed there’s no obvious workaround. So when I got the call I said he’d have to wait until tomorrow and instead, he uninstalled the device management, which in turn overrides the settings. It’s a known risk of the product and the OurPact people sent me an alert immediately.
I’m furious about it. Because the result is an impact on my time. I have to be the one to resolve it, and I have to go through a whole process of backup/restoration and installations to reinstall the functionality. It’s a 10-20min process minimum and although that’s nothing to lose my cool over, I do and I am because my time is really precious to me.
I am also livid about it because he did this once before and promised me he’d never do it again. I was cool about it that time, almost impressed that he'd found a way around it, but made it clear it was not to happen again.
My response tonight has been to fume and stew and to try and come up with some level of consequence that ‘befits the crime’. The 1st being to smash the phone into pieces and never get him another one but that’s absurdly counterproductive. The next is to refuse to take him snowboarding again for the rest of the season, also extreme. Then I thought about cancelling the Whale Watching outing I just setup for us for the weekend but it’s non-refundable, so that’s not an option either. And taking the phone away is a more suiting natural consequence but it’s not necessarily a big deal to him and all he does is force his sister to let him use her phone. It becomes a punishment for her, and his mom and me, too, when he’s not able to communicate or be reached.
Then it hit me. “Lost Mode”. The iOS feature that lets me remotely lock a device with a unique passcode and message. So I did just that. I’ve locked it. With the message “Locked due to Device Management removal. Contact OurPact administrator.”. And it’ll remain locked until I am able to reinstall the app again, and make my upset known, and likely draft a simple agreement he’ll have to sign that documents some far more serious consequences for his consideration the next time he’s tempted to pull this shit. Like losing a month of screen time or the chance to go snowboarding.
I hate this shit. I hate it with a passion. I should not have to even deal with this let along deal with the need to police at this level and it’s heartbreaking and infuriating all at the same time.
But it’s also nothing more than my responsibility to guide him to make better ethical choices, of which this is far and away less significant than any number of situations I could be facing with a 14yr old who’s ‘crime’ is nothing beyond testing the limits and pushing the boundaries. Just like I did at 14 too.
I know one thing for sure. The meditation is helping me, my writing this out has helped as well, and I’m returning to that place of calm again. But it did hit a very sensitive nerve too and my response this time was not as mindful as I would prefer. And I’m glad the phone wasn’t in reach the moment I got the notification that he’d disabled that lockdown.
So, the takeaway is that there is still work to be done. For both of us.