ADHD Playdate

My dogs both have tracking transmitters. While our family doctor may raise all sorts of weird, fussy "ethical" objections, I'm hoping the vet may be an easier sell on my proposal to have one placed on my daughter.

Diva is ten - ten - and I haven't seen her for three days and perhaps only a dozen times since the start of summer. Oh, she's not missing, or anything. She just sort of has a life of her own which, at present, has taken her to a marathon sleepover/playdate. What the hell... it's summer, right?
We got her a cell phone and she's very good about having it with her at all times but all that texting and Facebooking plays hell with the battery and she's drawn the line at carrying around a power cord as well. So, the tracker.

To be fair, I haven't seen a whole lot more of Wild Child, but no tracking device will ever be necessary to locate him; the noise alone is a pretty good giveaway. While my daughter roams her kid-sized world with an ever widening circle of friends, my son keeps mostly to his room, ensconced up there in his underwear, surrounded by the discards of snacks and very...um, vocally...playing his Xbox. If I'm not at home though, he's even harder to reach than my daughter is, as his phone is invariably somewhere useless and far away.

I was out the other day and needed to reach him fairly urgently. No answer. Hmm. I pulled over and used my phone to access the computer in my office next to his room. I typed in 96pt. on the desktop: GO GET YOUR DAMN PHONE! then cranked up the system volume to full and turned on something from Avenue Q (which usually gives him fits). I figured he’d hear it, go check it out and see the note. Nope. “Now what?” I wondered, “Ah”. If he couldn't hear it, it must be because he was wearing his headset. And that meant he was online with his friend. So I called his friend. "Jason, are you live with Wild Child? Yes? Will you tell him, please, to go get his damn phone?" That did the trick. When he called, the first thing he said was "Why does my mom have to be the biggest geek?"

While I worry about Diva’s independence and Wild Child’s lack of it, I was even more concerned about my son’s tendency toward isolation. I’m an introvert and can fully relate to being comfortable with a fairly high level of solitude but “comfortable” in his case, is not “happy”. So when the Xbox took over his life, we went into full panic mode. That our already odd, not-exactly-popular, loner might well disappear forever into a virtual world seemed entirely probable. We put in place rules, limits, timers; we forced him to go outside, we nagged him to call his friends, we badgered him relentlessly and threatened to take away the controllers - in short, pretty much what parents do. None of which had the slightest impact on his consuming desire to retreat to his room and play Xbox.

My little adventure with trying to reach him tipped me to something I’d been missing all along: He is playing with his friends. That they prefer to meet in a bombed out urban wasteland or on a distant planet, that they communicate over headsets, that some of them are in a different time zone, doesn’t - and shouldn't - make that much difference. They get together. They play and have fun. In between bellows and shouts and “COVER MY BACK!” and “DUDE, YOU TEA BAGGED HIM!”, they talk about stuff 12-year-old boys talk about. So I think the next time I want him to see his friends, I’ll send him to his room.