One of the moms we know from school tells her son that she has cameras everywhere and can see everything he does. It’s a clever variation on the old “eyes in back of the head” line many a grown-up has used on many a child.
As a method to make sure a child behaves, it’s a bit scary to me, and not all that different from using Santa as a scare tactic (“He knows if you’ve been bad or good”) – I suppose many parents have used religion that way too, come to think of it. (I’m not going to go there).
I don’t want to debate the ethics here, but merely to point out our part as one of mom’s cameras.
A few days ago, my oldest told my wife that she had asked this little boy to marry her. He told her no. She begged a bit more, telling him, “you can make all the decisions!” This of course terrorized my wife, thinking she was raising a strong-willed, confident female, but she didn’t show it. (She’s pretty sure our girl tells her things like that because it pushes those buttons).
In any case, the boy still has said no. Perhaps some day he’ll regret it, perhaps not.
My wife relayed this story to the boy’s mother. A few days later, she tells my wife that she asked her son if anyone has asked him to get married. He told her no, but was unable to look in her eyes as he said it, the classic tip-off.
So the mother then presses the matter: are you sure, son? Didn’t someone even offer to let you make all the decisions if you get married?
The look on the boy’s face when he realized:
You really do have cameras everywhere!
Must have been one for… well, the cameras!
Now, as a big buddy of this young man, who someday will end up teaching me how to hunt, I’m very tempted to give away mom’s secret, that in fact mom doesn’t have cameras but does have other moms – but of course, it’s pretty much the same thing. Unless he can convince my daughter not to tell my wife what’s going on – which might eventually happen some day, of course! – he’s stuck, trapped in the endless vision of all those cameras watching him!
The French philosopher Michel Foucault famously wrote about the way social orders discipline themselves in modern times, using as his metaphor the prison design called the panopticon – a prison with a central guard tower able to provide views of all the cells without the prisoners being able to discern if any guards were actually in the tower looking. The effect in theory is self-policing.
Moms have been using this principle long before anyone ever conceived of a building to do it.
Of course, sometimes those other eyes can be wrong, and I want to share another story about that, next time.