“Mom, stop photographing me”: what I learned taking a walk on the beach with my son

Early morning. Eight eight have just passed, when and my son Leon and I, 8 years old and rigorously speechless hair, we are already in the saddle of our bicycle, headed towards the Lungomare di Cervia. A few meters and we are in front of the bathing establishment that this year we have chosen as a basis for ours Summer holidays in Romagna. There, as always, the grandmother awaits us and together with her all that air of Romagna that we miss so much when we are in Rome, where we live the rest of the year. On the shore he welcomes us the orderly choreography of umbrellas and sunbeds which are a certainty and especially home. The lifeguard with the red tank top, which is not a stereotype but a real icon, the pedals with the slide above, the ladies that walk with the water that arrives at the height of the thighs, someone who jogging, others read the newspaper, then the children. Who already has the bucket, who is biting a brioche, those who wallow as much as I can at sea. Summer.

We walk with our feet not completely submerged in the water in the direction of the port. We cross the rocks and stop to look at the boats. It is one of those simple moments, in which there is no hurry. “Mom, enough, stop with his cell phone.” A child who will have the age of Leon, angrily comes out of the water. In front of him, a short distance from us, a lady with the holdel on the neck, similar to what I wear at that moment too, replies by sketching a smile: “But I can never make you even a photo”. Leon asks me to stop to bathe next to the rocks, here the water is cleaner and there are also fish that come out here and there. Sitting on a rock not far away, a girl smiles for the fake, the fringe spectated by the wind, while the mother invites her to “put herself straight” and smile. The girl just wants to return to the water, satisfy her mother but before throwing herself in the water she says slowly: “But don’t show her around”.

I observe and realize that this scene, after all, I recognize it. I also happened to ask my son to stop for a moment, to look at me, to smile “just a second”. Because yes, I wanted to keep that moment but sometimes also take a nice photo to be published on social media. But who really belongs to that moment, I wondered. It is not a question that I can answer but I know that walking on the beach with my son I have witnessed these days and many moments when adults with their cell phone in hand have tried to take a photo of their children, despite themselves. What do we transmit with these continuous requests? What are there (and) do we deprive us of? Will it be for the ease with which the cell phone allows us to archive every moment of our life but then we really live that moment? Or does it become only another photo in our digital gallery? And to them, that after all, they would just like to spend some time with us, without rules and commitments, what do we communicate?

“Appear more important than being,” he reiterates Giuseppe Lavenia, Psychologist, psychotherapist and president of the National Association of Technological Dependencies, Gap and Cyberbullying. «And not because of the boys: we are teaching him. In a culture where only what is shown, and what is shown must be perfect, filtered, seductive, identity empties and the body becomes a product. Then we surprise ourselves if young people feel fragile, confused or without value. But what did they have to learn, looking at us adults? ».

Looking at those children on the beach, I wondered how many times we interrupt their freedom to be at the moment, To stop them in front of a screen, the same that to protect them then try not to make him keep it too much in his hands. Perhaps the most difficult task, for us parents, is to accept that not everything should be documented, archived, ordered. That some memories can live in our memory, blurred and imperfect, but full of real life. And I wonder: if we stopped photographing them so much, would we come back to really look at them?