Play Simon Says

BY JAYNIE MALONEY

iPads, iPhones X-Box, Playstations, Apple watches and basically anything that plugs in has become a never ending challenge in my house. Most days I find myself sounding like an old lady, talking about the good old days. You know, the days when as kids we played in the street with our friends until it got dark, the days when we would play eye spy on long car trips, when we would go to restaurants and, wait for it – talk.

The days when our parents felt no guilt at all about our complaints of being bored. They weren’t our entertainment managers and they weren’t going to pretend to be, they would answer cries of “I’m bored’ with “go outside”, because according to parents of our generation, being outside solved all of our problems. I have to say, I think they were onto something. Parenting has changed. The challenges are different. And one of the biggest challenges, and my personal parenting nemesis – is technology. Screens, devices and all of the multilayered problems they bring with them – from social media and the social pressure and anxiety that it brings with it, to our children having the entire internet at their fingertips and them being exposed to things we cannot see or monitor, to gaming, the instant gratification and the myriad of other risks and impacts that come with kids and technology. How old should they be? How much time is too much time? How do we know when there is a problem? How do we supervise them but give them privacy at the same time? With every app, every website, every new device comes a whole new set of questions, and as a parent, all we ever want to do is the right thing for our kids but this stuff doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Perhaps we could google one, on a device? Anyone?

For a long time I tried to hold out and deny technology in our house, but as my boys got older, it was harder to avoid. I have always had fairly strict boundaries around device time, but over time these were pushed and stretched, and then school holidays would come and throw any existing structure into chaos.

One time I was so overwhelmed and frustrated and I felt I had lost control, devices were creeping into times when they weren’t supposed to and I couldn’t seem to pull it back – so in desperation I loaded every single device and remote control into my car and took it work, and left it there for 3 weeks. I felt like I needed and they needed a detox, and we needed a chance to reset those boundaries that had slipped, so we did. It felt extreme, but I didn’t know what else to do.

I guess the point here, is that this beast is not going anywhere. I am not saying that there are no benefits to technology, because there are many – but I am saying that children and teens don’t have the brain development to regulate their use of devices, or the maturity to handle everything that they see, so that bit is our job. It has to be. According to David Gillespie, author of “Teen Brain” our kids need us to step up and take charge. He says that in less than a decade, we have totally changed the future of the human race, and we have done it without so much of a backward glance. He goes on to say that what he found in a nutshell was: 1. The biology of puberty makes the teen brain uniquely fragile. It makes teens susceptible to addictions that can last for life and usher in mental illness 2. Parenting is much more permissive and parents need to harden up to save their kids 3. Unfettered access to screens is driving an epidemic of addiction, depression

Formulating The Future One Thought at a Time...

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