My Friend Jericho Is Mad As Hell, And With Good Reason

My friend Jericho is mad as hell, and it’s easy to understand why.

What’s worse, there’s no specific person or thing upon which he can vent his justifiable anger.

Which makes him angrier still.

Jericho has a 12-year-old son who, he and his wife recently discovered, was enjoying, if that’s the right word, a secret and exciting life on the internet that had nothing to do with the values or limits his family holds dear.

Jericho’s son, whom we will call Thomas, was supposed to turn in his technology — his phone and his iPad — by 9 pm each night.

And yet, for months, Thomas had not been himself.

Listless, sleepy, depressed, bored with school.

In short, thought Jericho and his wife, a typical adolescent.

Mix in a pinch of pandemic, add the normal stress of puberty, take away band and lacrosse, Thomas’s after-school interests, and you have the perfect recipe for disaster.

A kid with too much time, and like most kids, way too much access to technology.

Ironically, Thomas had never done anything wrong in his life.

He had never received a time-out, nor could he describe for you, from personal experience, the inside of the principal’s office at his middle school.

So Jericho and his wife gave the kid a lot of rope, and unfortunately, the kid all but hanged himself with it.

Thomas apparently found an old iPhone in a drawer somewhere and switched out his SIM card at 9 pm, his technology bedtime.

He thus found people with whom to communicate, sometimes by FaceTime, and sometimes on platforms such as Discord and Minecraft, and he would talk and chat with them into the wee hours of the night.

“We were completely clueless,” a shamefaced Jericho admits. “If only we had caught it sooner.”

Jericho discovered something was amiss when he heard Thomas, through his closed bedroom door, talking, after hours.

When Jericho went into the room, he saw that Thomas was lying in bed wearing an earbud.

In some ways, Jericho admits, he’s lucky, because the family did catch it before things got as bad as they could have gotten.

“He was telling girls he loved them,” Jericho says, ruefully. “We don’t know if these were actual teenage girls, or whether they were adult men.”

“We searched the device as best we could, and as far as we can tell, he wasn’t making plans to meet any of them.”

“No drugs were involved, no cutting, no self-harm. But there was one TikTok video that talked about suicidality.”

“It scared the you-know-what out of us.”

Thomas is detoxing from technology these days.

He is never left alone, and parents and older siblings are taking turns with him watching episodes of the Jetsons and the Flintstones, to occupy the hours that used to be filled with communicating with his army of new and inappropriate friends.

“I wish I could go punch somebody out,” Jericho admits. “But there’s nobody to punch! It’s the whole world!”

“We got off easy, because it could have been so much worse.”

“It makes sense that kids would become addicted to all the variety and excitement they can find online.”

“All I can say to any other parent is, if your kid is acting weird, or tired, or depressed, there’s a huge chance that the internet has something to do with it.”

“From one parent to another, if it happened to my kid, it could happen to anybody’s kid.”

“Go find out for yourself.”