What Happened When My Teen Blocked Me On Social Media

I know my teens want a life that is separate from their lives with me. I get it. I’m not “cool” and they aren’t supposed to want to hang out with their mom because, let’s face it, I can humiliate them with one word, look, or bad hair day.

I give them space and privacy, but I have a limit — and that limit was reached the other day when my daughter asked me if I saw my son’s Instagram post. I ran to my phone to check it out because I couldn’t tell by the look on her face if it was a sweet post and she wanted me to know, or she was frightened by something he posted, and she wanted me to know.

You can imagine my shock and rage when I realized, after I couldn’t find his Instagram despite my feverish searching, that I’d been blocked.

Oh hell no. I don’t think so, son. Mama don’t play like that.

I don’t have to be my kids’ friend. They don’t have to tell me everything, and I try not to get up their ass about too many things because I believe they deserve a bit of privacy to screw up and make things right on their own.

Also, it’s essential for teens to have alone time not only by themselves, but with friends to socialize. And my kids get plenty of all those things — but I’ll be damned if I am going to let them block me from their social media accounts.

First of all, his reasoning was all wrong. He said he blocked me after I liked 25 of his posts in less than 2 minutes one afternoon while I was missing him when he was with his friends. How horrible for him that his mom loves him so much she likes pictures of him and his friends on their skateboards, or biking in the dirt.

And second, our kids have no idea how hard it is to manage what they are doing online (and we all know that shit needs to be managed hard) when they us block from their social media. If they want a phone, they need to understand this has to be a group effort, their mother needs to see what they are up to, as well as check on what their friends are up to. There’s no way my kid is going to be wild and free on his phone at the tender age of 14.

They can find privacy in their room with the door closed without their phones — now that’s something parents can get behind. It’s as if they think they are going to get away with more after they’ve blocked their parents, but what they haven’t figured out is all it does is draw attention to themselves and leads us to believe they are really up to some sketchy shit.

So, they might as well let us give them all the likes and smiley face emojis we want and save everyone lots of drama and hacking.

My kids can block me all they want — I can take the phone away and add exactly one thousand selfies of me to their SnapChat story if they can’t follow my rules.

If they want a phone of their own, they need to tell me what their password is, and not block me from any of their platforms.

Besides, I pay for that damn thing, so really, it’s mine.