“It’s an idea that I heard on the radio one day. It was a 16 for 16 challenge, where a mom was going to pay her daughter $1600 to do something when she was 16. I thought that perhaps I could do something like that for Sivert. So I came home and made a deal with him. I would pay him $1800 to stay off of social media until he was 18 years old.”
After his older sisters became obsessed with social media and after seeing how it affected their moods, she wanted to save her youngest child from going down a similar path.
“Sivert’s sisters are five, six, and seven years older than he is, and so we watched how social media at a young age affected them. We tried to limit their social media as teenagers with varying degrees of success. One daughter, in particular,(social media)became something that was really affecting her mood, her self-esteem, and she was really struggling with it in a noticeable way. We ended up taking her phone away, which she didn’t love. But after about three weeks we started to see an incredibly noticeable change in her behavior.”
One of the only issues that arose over not having access to social media for Sivert, a senior at Staples-Motley High School, was his ability to communicate with college athletic programs and potential recruiters. But, with text messaging and phone calls that was not too much of a hurdle.
Sivert will be playing football at the University of Northwestern-St. Paul in the fall. He also didn’t waist any time creating an Instagram account. His IG bio reads, “I’m new here, be nice to me.”
He plans to use his $1,800 on college supplies.
