Thursday, February 26, 2015

You think your drunk college-age daughters are bad with their iPhones? Imagine them with guns.

Yeah, that's actually the title of an article at the Washington Post.  Some woman named Anne Skomorowsky, who is a psychiatrist at Columbia University Medical Center tells us all we need to know about raising teenagers and sending them off to college.  It's remarkably fisk-able.  Lets start four paragraphs down.
My daughter dropped her first iPhone outside an off-campus party, the kind of sports-related, senior-sponsored event that is infamously associated with sexual assault. When the cops showed up, she stood frozen until someone grabbed her hand and pulled her into the woods. As she ran from the police with her friends, her phone fell into a snow bank and was never seen again.
Interesting.  Her seventeen year old daughter was at an off-campus party, "the kind.. that is famously associated with sexual assault".  The cops show up, daughter runs from the police, and the good doctor is most concerned about her cell-phone.  Amazing.  We haven't gotten to the guns issue yet, but we're learning that the doctor's daughter has poor decision-making skills.  Let's go to the next paragraph, shall we?
 We bought her a replacement, a highly desirable 5s that she promised to guard with her life. Weeks later, after another party, my “slightly drunk” daughter tumbled down some stairs. She wasn’t injured, but the iPhone screen was cracked.
 Drunk again, her daughter is showing signs of freshman-itis.  Poor judgement, made worse by alcohol.  Thankfully, we learn that the girl wasn't hurt, but her iPhone took a disabling hit.  I think I'd quit buying her phones.  When she starts paying for them herself, she might learn to take better care of them.  But then we drop into the truly bizarre.  We can't make this stuff up, but the psychiatrists tries to draw the parallel.
Just imagine that my daughter’s iPhone was a gun. One lies in the snow in a suburban forest. Maybe it will be found in the spring, by children playing in the woods, or other young adults running from the police. The other bounced down a staircase along with several intoxicated teenagers.  What could possibly go wrong?
Good imagination, Doc, but I can't imagine your daughter having a gun of any type.  She's not mature enough.  First, get her to treatment for her nascent alcoholism (two drunks in two paragraphs), and let her grow up a little bit.

For myself, I kept a gun in my college dorm the whole time.  My buddies and I hunted and fished our say through college, and everyone just kind of expected that we'd have a gun in the room, although officially, the university prohibited it.  The university also prohibited alcohol in the dorm, but as long as it wasn't a problem, it wasn't a problem.  But then, in my day, college students were expected to be adults, not overgrown children.  We were expected to act like adults, and to pay the consequences when we failed.

We never had a problem with guns on campus, but we were expected to be adults.  There is probably a lesson there that even a doctor pf psychiatry can understand.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As Bugs would say: "What a maroon!"