what is it about your crippling cell phone addiction they find so reprehensible? The only legitimate gripe I can think of is that they fear your emailing will prevent you from saving your son from a limb-cracking fall. But, honestly, is that a valid concern? In this era of protective mulch surfaces and government-regulated slide design, playgrounds are safer than ever. Yes, accidents do happen—every year, roughly 200,000 kids pass through emergency rooms after playground misadventures. But how many of those injuries, few of which are more serious than broken bones, are the result of lax supervision? Unless you’re Usain Bolt, you can’t possibly sprint across a playground fast enough to stop every stumble.

On the contrary, in addition to helping preserve your sanity, a little playground smartphoning might actually be doing your son a world of long-term good.

“This can teach him about appropriate boundaries and make him appreciate that parents have multiple roles,” says Michael Ungar, a family therapist and author of The We Generation: Raising Socially Responsible Kids. At the ripe old age of 2, your kid is old enough to start learning that the world doesn’t revolve around him—and, as a corollary, that he can go off and play without seeking your constant approval. That’s far preferable to making him suffer beneath the noisy rotors of your helicopter vigilance, which has been shown to cause anxiety problems later in life (right, Mom?).

My approval of your iPhone habit is contingent, of course, on the assumption that you employ common sense. You look up from YouTube when Junior is dangling from the monkey bars or running around with sharp sticks, correct? If not, yeah, you probably are a bad parent.

My town council has banned me from attending its meetings because I criticized one of its members on Twitter. (OK, OK, I called him a “fucking idiot.”) Can they really do that?

It would be one thing if you’d been barred from a homeowners’ association or Rotary Club meeting—private organizations have carte blanche to bounce anyone who dares question their awesomeness. But local governments must act in accordance with a little doohickey called the First Amendment. That means they’re rarely allowed to bar people from their public forums.

The council has one shot at making its ban stick. “If they can show that the person would be very disruptive, that might work,” says David L. Hudson Jr., a scholar at the Vanderbilt University’s First Amendment Center. But unless you’ve wreaked havoc at past meetings—say, by tossing chairs or burning effigies—the council will have a tough time proving its case. The city of Dayton, Ohio, learned that lesson the hard way in 1997, after it was sued by a man who’d been kicked out of a public commission meeting for wearing a ninja mask. An appeals court ruled in favor of the ninja, finding that his menacing attire was a protected form of speech (this despite the fact that everyone knows ninjas don’t talk).

Lawsuits are an expensive pain, so you should try to find a way of changing the council’s mind before resorting to the courts. Since your town elders are obviously Twitter fans, how about using the microblogging service to make them (and fellow townsfolk) aware that you’re in the constitutional right here? Just be polite about it—save the f-bombs for the next atrocious zoning blunder.

My brother has accused me of being a snob for having that “Sent from my iPad” footer at the bottom of my emails. He’s unemployed, so I guess he thinks I’m rubbing his nose in my success. Who’s the jerk here?

It’s clear your beleaguered brother is using his unemployed status to mask his inferiority complex and that his time would be better spent looking for work than worrying about your material possessions. Hey, that was easy!

But wait a sec—why, exactly, do you insist on keeping that default iPad signature? There aren’t many good reasons that spring to mind, aside from wanting colleagues to know that your typos are the result of transmitting on the run. (But isn’t that more of an iPhone issue?) Perhaps you’ve been too swamped to change the settings, though doing so takes only a few seconds. (Look under Mail, Contacts, Calendars in the Settings menu.) Or maybe, just maybe, you’ve kept the signature because there’s a shred of truth to your brother’s accusation—that you secretly love how that “Sent from my iPad” makes the world aware of your early-adopter status.

Take a moment to search your soul and ponder why, exactly, you continue to do Apple’s factory-set bidding. Unless you have a compelling reason, it’s time to delete the footer, thereby bringing your brother a scintilla of joy. Sounds like he could use it.

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Authors: Brendan I. Koerner

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