Why my children will hate me now.

• By Alison
• 23 April, 2010
• 10 Comments

I’m not what you’d call a technical prude. Quite the opposite in fact. I embrace technology whole heartedly, then let it consume me and take over my life, with potentially embarrassing consequences.

The house is practically wired up without wires, and my next move will probably be to attach a mac mini to my toaster and coffee machine for the perfect breakfast. Kind of like what a teasmaid would have done, but with a cooler logo.

As a result of the vast array of technology scattered around our house and carried about our persons, my children are far too technologically savvy for my liking. My 8 year old talks about “googling it”, and my 6 year old downloads iPhone apps at will. However, they both know that neither of those things are done without adult supervision. They just know how to do it.

I’ve explained to Miss Trouble Pants why googling (and youtubing) mustn’t be done without mummy – my reasoning was that some people like to put things that will upset children on the internet, so if she searched for “pussy” she might find pictures of a dead pussycat. That was seriously upsetting enough for her, without the need for me to talk about what would REALLY come up under a search for “pussy”.

At the moment we don’t have a net nanny or other parental guidance set up on the children’s computer. But the computer rules are strict, and the computer is in the main room of the house. And besides – the main motivation for using the computer is to play club penguin, the evils of which have nothing to do with the content or game play!

Things have taken a technological turn for the worse recently however. Miss Trouble Pants has started asking for her own mobile phone. Not just any phone – she wants an iPhone. I said NO! in a heartbeat then she told me that her friend at school had one (a mobile, but not an iPhone). I didn’t believe her. But it’s true.

I’ve just read an article in the telegraph that says that “Children get first mobile phone at average age of eight“. My jaw was dragging about on the floor, since an average means the midway point. Who in their right mind gives a phone to kids of this age and younger? Whose kids are in situations where they are out alone and might need to get in touch with their parents when they are still in the infant section of the school?

At this point, I need to point out that I grew up with both freedom, and strict rules. I spent afternoons down at Brown’s Waterhole and playing in Lane Cove National park. As young as primary school my friend Imogen and I would play in the street outside our homes.

We were out of sight of our parents, but we had a curfew on which to arrive home. When I was in high school I didn’t go out at night with friends without telling my mother where we would be, and when I’d be home – within curfew. On a school night I would rarely be out past 9pm unless it was to Guides or Rangers, after which I’d be picked up by a parent anyway.

I don’t really remember how I got to school when I was in kingergarten, but in first grade, I travelled to school on a bus with older children. When I was in 3rd grade and upwards, I walked to school – it took about 20 minutes. Neither of those travel arrangements included my mother.

When I hit high school, I had to take a bus, train and then a 15 minute walk to get to school. 

My biggest fear was getting on the wrong train, which inevitably happened early on, and induced panic (especially as it was a long distance train, with the first stop being Parramatta).

I was travelling with a friend, and we both rushed out of the station when the train stopped at Parramatta, went straight to a pay phone and called my mother. She drove over and picked us up about 30 minutes later. Of course, a year later we’ve both have happily just got onto a train going back to Strathfield and then headed out to Epping on the next one available.

So how different would my young life have been if I had a mobile phone at the tender age of 8? For a start, my mother would never have had to drive to Parramatta, which in those days wasn’t a nice place to be – so win win for her!

But otherwise, the stay in contact part of the phone would have done little to improve my life. And on the flip side, I might have become so addicted to downloading apps, that instead of being a bookworm, and going to the library after school – I might have spent all my time playing ragdoll blaster.

My 8 year old daughter’s friend was showing off her mobile, by showing the other girls some clips on youtube. There’s a whole bunch of reasons not to let her one in the first place right there! Thousands of reasons in fact! Most of them involving large vegetables and dubious lonely men.

I am a big fan of free range kids. It’s how I grew up, and it’s how I want my girls to grow up. Except that I want them to grow up in the leafy and sprawling Australian bushland suberbia that I did. Not the crowded British urban suburbia we live in now. My 8 year old does NOT walk to school by herself.

To get there she needs to cross two roads. Not broad roads free of cars like the ones that I crossed as a child, but narrow crowded roads, lined with parked cars and full of speeding drivers. The influx of traffic increases at school time because so many people drive their kids to school, and are always late. It’s different to when I was a child.

When she’s 10, I think we’ll be working on the walk to school by herself thing. That effort of letting go will probably be hard! But it’s important. It won’t mean furnishing her with a mobile phone though.

And neither will high school – not for the normal journeys to and from school. I certainly understand that when she gets older and starts going out with friends late at night then I’ll be happy for her to have a mobile that she can use in case travel plans go awry.

But having a mobile phone doesn’t give you armour against the things that we are most worried about. Because if someone who meant harm grabbed a child, that child is unlikely to have time to call home and announce “call the police, I am being kidnapped”. You also can’t phone home to tell your parents that you were just hit by a car and seriously injured.

Having a phone helps you keep in touch, but it doesn’t offer protection. And I don’t think that it benefits children to be tethered to an adult by electronic means at a young age, or that they benefit from advanced technology being taken for granted or used like a toy. If I was that worried, I could get my kids chipped like the cat. I think the better solution is education, rules, and trust.

Now of course, if the CAT asked for a mobile phone I’d consider it. Maybe then I could ring him at 4.30 in the morning and ask him how on earth it takes 30 minutes to pop out and have a wee.