This past weekend, I helped my mom set up a Snapchat account. I know what you’re thinking, especially as a college student, why would I help my mom check up on what I’m doing when I’m not at home? Well here’s the thing, I don’t really have anything to hide from my parents and I thought she would never actually say yes, but here we are.
Anyways I was on Snapchat as I usually am and I took a video of my mom laughing because trust me it’s really funny and she asked me why I never save any of the videos to show her later. I told her it’s Snapchat; I only remember to save things half the time because I use it for quick responses. This is when she told me she was getting Snapchat and proceeded to ask me how to set up an account. At this point I couldn’t really say no, so instead, I embraced it.
Her favorite part of setting up her account was creating her bitmoji. My mom had a very good time. Let me tell you, we spent an hour making sure it looked almost exactly like her. I helped her with everything from narrowing down her specific hair color to the face shape of her bitmoji. She would hold up her phone and have me compare how similar they looked, and then we’d move to the next step. I will say her bitmoji has my stamp of approval, I have to admit it looked pretty good.
Next on this Snapchat journey was adding people to talk to. I pretty much did this for her. I added me and my brother and any family member of ours that was on Snapchat. I thought that would be the extent of this process but my mom proceeded to scroll through the names and added all of my friends, who have told me that she snaps them from time to time. I wasn’t too worried by this because all my friends like my mom and claim she’s the “cool” mom, which I take as a compliment for the both of us.
My mom’s next experiment was the filters. This involved her taking multiple pictures and sending them to me and asking what I thought. To be honest, this was my favorite part, it was very funny watching my mom make silly faces in the camera. I thought I would be in the clear with one piece missing: the snap locations. However, while she was messing with filters, she swiped down the map and she saw my bitmoji. After this, I knew there was no going back. Sure, I could keep my location from her but what’s the point? She already knows what it is, and again, I don’t have a reason to hide it from her. With my luck, she’ll forget how she did it and won’t check the location again.
So, my final thoughts on my mom getting Snapchat are that it really isn’t that big of a deal and it was really funny watching her try to learn how to use something that comes so easily for most of us. I even thought that by her getting Snapchat, it would give me more ways to get a hold of her but I was wrong, she still takes forever to respond or doesn’t respond at all. Just my luck LOL, but she’s getting better.