This holiday season, people will bombard you with thinkpieces on how to talk to your family while avoiding uncomfortable topics and encourage you to record your older family members with the StoryCorps app to help preserve their memories.
But for one young man, the biggest challenge, both technical and familial, appears to be getting his mom off her dang cell phone.
Scribbly handwriting and a hyperbolic fine make up a sad “ticket” from a young boy to his mother, which was shared in an unverified image posted to Reddit by /u/wtrsld. In the notice, he scolds his mom for “being on your phone most of the time and not being with me. (Seriously).”
The 42-digit fine underscores just how much he’s feeling ignored. While there were no additional comments from dad (the original poster), similar stories were shared in the thread. Apparently, the habit of ignoring children in favor of technology is pretty widespread—people expressed their own embarrassment at leaving kids unattended when playing video games, or being forced to confront their bad habits when the kids started mimicking their tech-addled behavior.
From games that try and force us to not look at our phones for an entire dinner with friends to creepy artwork that turns mobile devices into face-sucking pieces of technology, the struggle to disconnect from smartphones and other devices is a very real, and very obvious, problem for many.
Fake or not, this note from a boy to a woman who spends perhaps a bit too much time with her nose in a mobile device reminds us all to think a bit harder about our behaviors, and how our Internet browsing and Instagram liking might be affecting other people.
Photo via plantronicsgermany/Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)
