A Close Reading of the Law

I was at my wits' end with Ian the other night, but apparently what I construed as willful and wanton disregard for our Internet policy was really the result of an authentic communication failure between him and Amy.

When we came home Saturday night, Ian had logged onto Amy's computer and was eagerly poring over some Pokemon-related website. This was after I had yelled at him for a similar e-venture earlier in the day. And at the time, I read him the riot act.

But sometime the next afternoon, I discovered that Ian really felt entitled to go online, and that this was based on a very rational processing of something that Amy had said to him. When we were setting out to go to a holiday festival on Saturday, and apparently Ian was more interested in visiting some eight-year-old-consumer website, she told him something like, "You can go online any time, but this festival only comes once a year."

Well, disregarding the irrelevant consideration of a festival that comes once a year, the real legal substance of what Amy had told him, as far as Ian was concerned, was that he "can go online any time." And what part of "any time" is subject to parsing or interpretation? Here, she had told him that he could go online any time, and that was exactly what he did; he went online the first chance that he got after we arrived at home. This time fit within the framework of "any time," so he did exactly what he "could" do! I have to stress, at this point, that I don't think that he was acting in his recurrent capacity as "Attorney McDershowitz" here; Ian would make a superb lawyer, and often beats us in our own "court," but in this case, I think he was just being a child - a highly logical one, but not in a deliberately self-serving way - and taking Amy precisely, and sincerely, at her word. She said he could go online any time; he went online any time.

I was contrite (and guild-ridden, of course) in my apology to Ian for my unbridled censure of the previous evening. My Internet policy isn't changing - there's no way I'm going to let my eight-year-old boy go online without significant "babysitting," and these forays must be brief and relatively infrequent. But I felt very bad, because I think, in his literal reading of the grown-up white-noise around him, he was just proceeding with a perceived carte blanche. When I told Amy about it, she instantly saw how he might misconstrue her utterance.

And best of all, she conceded that it was somewhat unlawyerly of her to discuss Internet access with that particular "language" without imagining Ian's interpretation. We all know that Ian has potential in this professional field well beyond the bounds of our own comparatively feeble intellects. Some people are just naturally very technical.

(December 7, 2011)