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The Little Boy - Jason Stadtlander

The Little Boy

The Little Boy 600 400 Jason Stadtlander

A little boy sits on the plush carpet of the warm house, playing with his plastic dinosaurs, one T-Rex battles a brontosaur and of course, the T-Rex wins. A pterodactyl swoops in and attacks the T-Rex, dropping a rock on him from high above and saving the brontosaur. “Bam!” the little boy says excitedly, giggling with the innocent laughter that only a small child can elicit.

A young father sits in his recliner, reading the newspaper, glancing down at his small boy playing and he smiles, then goes back to the classified section to continue his job hunt, so that he can continue to give that little boy a warm home to play dinosaurs in.

Not many years later, that little boy tells the father how much he hates him for the rules that he locks him down with and in haste, leaves the warm home, breaking the heart of the man who looked down at the little boy on the carpet playing with his dinosaurs. The father can’t understand how the little boy went from the pure child on the carpet with the soft laughter to the teen whose anger has consumed him.

Some time passes and the boy has made a few more steps down the wrong road and is sitting on the curb outside of the apartment he was just evicted from with three boxes sitting next to him, his life possessions. He reaches into the box and pulls out a plastic pterodactyl and a T-Rex and he wishes secretly to himself that he could fly away on the plastic dinosaur. The boy thinks about how last night he came so close to taking his own life in his depressed fog. Somehow, something stayed his hand but only he knew how close he came. These thoughts flow through his mind as a car pulls up the curb. The passenger window rolls down and the father smiles from the driver’s seat and gets out. Picking up the boxes and placing them in the back of the car, the father scoops up his little boy and helps him into the passenger seat.

More years pass and the boy finds himself sitting beside the bed in the warm house he grew up in, holding his father’s hand. He tells his father that he is sorry for how he treated him years ago and how much he loves him. His father smiles and squeezes the boy’s hand telling him simply “I know you love me, I’ve always known, even when you didn’t know.” as the father takes his last breath.

In grief, the boy sits on a folding chair by the stone which bears his father’s name, and sets his plastic T-Rex and pterodactyl on the top of the stone, then puts his face in his own hands and cries silently. While sitting at the stone, he feels a hand touch him and turns around to see his small boy’s hand on his shoulder. The boy, now a father, smiles as a few tears stream down his face and he picks up the T-Rex and pterodactyl, handing them to the little boy who takes them with his own innocent smile.

In a warm house, the little boy sits on the carpet and plays with the pterodactyl and T-Rex as the man sits in a recliner reading the news and smiling down at the little boy on the carpet, playing dinosaurs.

YouTube addition with children

What Your Child is Watching on YouTube Might Surprise You

What Your Child is Watching on YouTube Might Surprise You 2124 1416 Jason Stadtlander

Tech addiction is a serious problem and any parent in today’s age is aware of this. YouTube is the drug of choice for most children. Dr. David Greenfield, founder of The Center for Internet and Technology Addiction explains that children (and anyone spending a lot of time on the internet) are often just “Looking for a little bit of dopamine.

If you have a child that is old enough to hold a mobile device, you most likely have a child that watches YouTube. Children are not watching television like we did growing up, they are watching their favorite YouTuber. I’m not going to go off and be an old ‘fart’ and say “when we were kids we played outside all the time and we never would have been stuck to the screen.” for two reasons, 1. It would be a partial lie. One of my favorite past times as a kid coming home from school was putting on the TV and watching HeMan or Transformers. 2. No matter how much any parent wants to admit it, times change and so does the entertainment for children – almost on a generational basis.

Whether you have a little girl or a little boy, nearly all the kids like the YouTube stars that do silly skits, funny songs or real-time video game commentary. Often times (unbeknownst to parents) the YouTube stars (especially the more amateur ones) use inappropriate language or discuss things that are outside the realm of what a child should be listening to (topics, discussions, etc.).

Now there are plenty of YouTube stars out there that are respectable and work hard to make sure that they stick to their audience. It’s very important that parents look at what YouTube shows their kids are watching and that they watch some of them on their own time (at least a few minutes). I also highly advise installing a parent monitoring software such as MobiCip that will let you see what videos your children are watching when you’re not around or that you might have missed them watching. It does cost a little bit of money but it’s a small price to pay to help keep an eye on your children’s technology.

One important note on parent monitoring apps such as MobiCip: Tell your children that you are monitoring them. My son is well aware that I can see what he views on the internet, I don’t hide that from him but I also don’t hover over him either. I respect his privacy and only if I feel he’s being sneaky or might be viewing something he should not be viewing, do I actually go look through the history.

Words of Wisdom

  • MOST IMPORTANT: Talk to your child calmly. Ask them what they are watching and why they enjoy watching it. Diving straight in and stopping them from watching any YouTube is not the answer (no matter how much you might like to do that). That will just force them to go watch something on a friends device (when you’re not around) giving you no knowledge of what they are watching.
  • Google your child’s favorite YouTube stars. You are bound to find an overview of what the YouTuber talks about, what kind of language they use and what their target audience is.
  • There are several good video blocker extensions in Chrome and Internet Explorer that can be added to block specific YouTube channels. If you if you see something your child shouldn’t be watching, block it with one of these utilities.

 

Coming to Terms with Our Digital Past

Coming to Terms With Our (Digital) Past

Coming to Terms With Our (Digital) Past 2000 1333 Jason Stadtlander

We all have ghosts in our closet, whether we want to admit it or not. And the digital age (the last 15-20 years) has created many new elements in our lives including the creation of massive amounts of digital photography, videos, and historic (digital paper) trails.

Hiding Under Your Nose

I recently purchased a NAS (Network Attached Storage), which is just a fancy way of saying “storage server” that holds all of my family photos, videos and every file I’ve ever created. I’m not going to go into the technical side of things with regards to this unit at the moment, but I will say that after combining all my hard drives onto this unit, I now have over 700,000 photographs. Before you freak out, understand that I’m the keeper of our family archives and there are photos going back to the year 1865 on this NAS.

This unit has facial recognition, location recognition, and several other organizational tools on it. In looking through these photos, I found images hidden to me for years (sometimes decades) and I became acutely aware of the fact that there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of pictures of awkwardness; ‘happy families’ now divorced, ex-girlfriends/boyfriends I never wanted to see again, friends that had become enemies and even photos of myself when I was clearly less than happy. I’m not talking about a ton of them, but enough that it makes me stand back and think about things for a moment.

It is incredibly tempting to select all of these photographs and hit the delete key, after all – that is another marvelous capability of the digital age. However, in doing so, I would deny three things:

  1. The ability to see other people that are still very dear to me that are also in these photos.
  2. The ability to look back and for a moment say to myself, “I may not like them, or like the relationship we (or they) now have (or do not have), but at that moment… that brief moment in my life, I was happy with them and they were important enough for me to capture that photo of.”
  3. The fact that one never knows where life will go and what doors may be opened and closed. Many years down the road, do I really want to regret having deleted a photo of this person or this situation?

Coming to Terms

No matter where we go in life from here on out, there are bound to be photos or connections in your collection, someone else’s collection, out on Facebook, on Twitter, news articles or elsewhere. Sometimes you will have the ability to delete these, but most times you won’t. You can choose to ignore these elements that show you (or others you care about) in situations you may not want to remember, but it doesn’t change the fact that they exist. It is in our nature to pretend that elements in our life don’t exist, to ignore them, to cast them aside if they hurt or cause us pain. The reality is, we are only fooling ourselves. To ignore something doesn’t make it go away, it just makes it easier for us to cope.

So I propose this; At some point, you too will go through your old photos, or you will see an article or post online that has you in it. Step back for a moment and instead of ignoring the post, the photo, the video or the connection – instead, ignore the pain. Think about the positive elements that caused you to be a part of that photo, post or article and allow simply to be. It is part of your past, and there isn’t anything you can do to re-write history. Instead, it is how you choose to deal with your past that allows you to handle the present and the future.

The Memories We Leave Behind

The Memories We Leave Behind 150 150 Jason Stadtlander

Fading MemoriesA 53 year old woman stands in her daughter’s bedroom doorway, her daughter having left for college. She looks around at her daughter’s bedroom. A room that was home to a small baby with a mobile hanging over the crib, later a little girl played with Barbies, said her evening prayers and made forts out of blankets. Not long after, a teen girl rushed in and quickly took off her soccer uniform, dropping it in a heap on the floor so that she could go shopping with friends.

A man stands alone, in his new apartment, the walls adorned with photos of his children that are at their mother’s home. Beanie babies lay lifelessly on the couch where two days ago the children played and laughed. The children will be back, but in these silent moments, the minutes tick by with the weight of a sledgehammer. The absence of laughter and moments missed are difficult to bear.

A brother and sister in their 60s stand in the opening of the garage to the home in which they grew up. Having buried their last parent that morning, they have the unenviable task of sorting through old belongings… of sifting through the memories.

In the end, all that exists of those we know, those we knew and of ourselves are the memories left behind in our minds and the minds of others. Generations pass, and stories are told but memories are lost and inevitably we cease to exist as a person that had dreams, held babies and made love to those that filled our heart. Eventually we are but merely a fact on a piece of paper or in a computer database. A name, a date of birth and perhaps a location of where we lived.

It sounds sad, and it is. But what can we do to change this? What can we do to make sure that we are more that just a name or a date?

For years I have been hired to sit down with those who want to have their story recorded and passed down for generations to come. I believe it’s critical to make sure we record each other’s stories. We all have a story to tell.

Please sit down with your family member, no matter what their age, and record their story. Ask them questions about their childhood, about their marriage, about whatever means the most to them and pass it on. Don’t let the lives of those you love be merely a memory to be lost in the wind.

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