▸ Column · Present day — Diana Prince answering letters from the modern world of men
WONDER WOMAN replies.
Replied to by Wonder Woman, with a rebuttal from Cheetah.
The letter
My son Declan is nine. The rule in our house is forty-five minutes of screen time on school days — no rollover, no exceptions, the iPad goes in the kitchen drawer at 4:15 sharp. Last week he came home crying because his whole friend group spent recess arguing about some Minecraft update he'd never heard of, and he said he's "the only kid alive" who doesn't know what a warden is. My husband wants me to loosen up and let him earn extra time on weekends. But I've read the research on developing brains and I truly believe the limit is good for him, even if he can't feel it yet. The trouble is that at his school, knowing these games seems to be the entire price of admission to friendship — and I've started to wonder whether my discipline is protecting his attention or just marking him as the odd one out. Am I guarding him, or isolating him?
Wonder Woman replies
Hear the hard thing first, sister: somewhere along the way the rule stopped serving the boy and the boy started serving the rule. That is the injustice in your letter, and you already smell it, or you would not have written.
On Themyscira I was drilled until my arms shook. But the discipline was never the point — the warrior was. The day a sword stops protecting the one who carries it, you do not worship the sword. You re-forge it.
Your instinct about his attention is sound. Your certainty is not. A child weeping because he has been locked out of his own people is not a developing brain. He is a person, and the wound is real today, not in some study about tomorrow.
So do not loosen and do not harden. Do the braver thing: sit with Declan and tell him the truth — that the limit is yours to give and yours to bend, and that you are bending it so he can learn to govern his own attention rather than have it governed for him. Let him earn the weekend time. That is not surrender. That is teaching him to hold the line himself one day. And your husband is not your opponent here. He is on the boy's side. So are you.
— Wonder Woman
Cheetah weighs in
How tender. Diana re-forges her little sword and calls it parenting.
Darling, look at what you've actually built: a cub you starve of the one thing the pack respects, then send into the long grass to be circled. The playground is a veldt — knowledge is teeth, and you've filed your son's down on principle.
Diana wants him to "govern his own attention." I want him to win. Give him the game. Let him be the child who knows more than the rest, the one they crouch toward — not the one weeping at the edge. The research will comfort you. It will not feed him. Out there, the well-fed always lecture the hungry about patience.
— Cheetah
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