I’ve struggled to get one of our kids to engage in our trips. He’s always along for the ride, but not really interested except on rare occasions (e.g., if we go to a baseball game, sports museum, or beach).
Usually, he’s using his headphones to listen to music on his iPhone as we wander around great places like Berlin or Miami, take in beautiful natural settings like mountains or lakes, or ride planes, trains and automobiles across states and countries. Getting him to take them out is a battle and the complaining begins as soon as his smart phone battery is drained – “When can we go back to the house or into a restaurant so I can charge my phone?”
When he was diagnosed earlier this year with auditory processing disorder, his dependence on the earphones made sense – noise, especially from different sources, is hard to process, and trying to process it wears him out, so he blocks it out with his headphones. On a recent trip to Maine, though, his engagement on our trip, and with the people and sites around him changed when we put him in charge of the Rocket Around You Tube channel, which I have badly neglected because I feel a little intimidated by shooting, posting and amplifying videos.
Not him – he LOVES videos – watching them, rolling on the floor laughing at them, posting them, and growing his number of views, likes, and comments. Absolutely loves all of it.
At first, he was hesitant, not really seeing the Rocket Around channel as very interesting or cool. I get it – I’ve never posted anything that uses the words bro, blood, rizz or yo. So I said, you are exactly what this channel needs – it needs you to make it interesting and cool, and we need you to take the headphones off, so I am placing the keys to this burgeoning channel in your teenage hands. And you need to keep your videos clean.
So away he went – 16 videos posted in two days. And there would have been more, but apparently YouTube imposes a limit on the maximum number of videos you can upload to your channel in a 24-hour period.
He posted about a mega yacht (a particularly popular upload with 1400+ views and counting in just over 24 hours), wandering on mountain and ocean paths, hiking along rocks to get into hard-to-reach caves, dogs riding in boats, old Chevrolets and a rock from the Ice Age. And between shooting videos, he made comments that have given me a lump in my throat – at one point on the trip, he looked out from the summit at Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park, taking in a stunning view of islands and ocean, and said, “This is really once in a lifetime.”
We held hands, and shared lots of hugs, he jump-scarred me about a dozen times, photo-bombed most of my pictures, was the first one out of the car at each stop, and on several ocassions, he broke out into spontaneous dancing. Oh, and his headphones broke along the way, but he didn’t complain about that or anything else.
I’ve always heard that if you give a neurodiverse kid a job, they’ll feel more invested and things can go more smoothly – I do believe that’s true. But I never expected his new job – Rocket Around YouTube channel master – to completely alter his level of enjoyment of and engagement in a trip. Somehow it did.
I never thought I’d say this, since I have a very testy relationship with my kids’ devices, but at this moment, I’m grateful for his iPhone.
Tune in to our channel as he tries to take it from boring to sheeeeeesh (his words, not mine)!