IGENERATION USHERS IN A NEW AGE OF PARENTING
WHEN it comes to guilt, modern parents have the motherload.
Sure, it’s never been an easy job … just ask my own mother. But I actually think today’s mums and dads have it worse.
Not that it’s a competition, nor am I asking for a pity party (although lots of gifts tomorrow would be just fine, thanks), but I am calling it how I see it.
Because when I became a mum 12 years ago, I didn’t just have a baby boy, I gave birth to a revolution.
It seems so apt (app-ed?) that just weeks before my son entered the world, so too did the iPhone.
Together I’ve watched as their combined intelligence, intuition and interruptions have turned my world upside down.
At least I could turn to books like What To Expect When You’re Expecting, Baby
Love and Save Our Sleep to figure out just how I was meant to handle the tiny human I was suddenly responsible for, even if some of the guides were more useful as fuel for a backyard bonfire.
Yet when it came to my brand new bundle of technology, I was on my own.
My generation of parents is at the brave new frontier of screen parenting. No one has trodden this path before us so we’re setting – or making up – the rules as we go along.
And literally every week there’s someone, somewhere, telling us just how wrong we’ve got it.
Do you let your toddler play on your phone to buy five minutes of peace to chat to another human adult, for example, or make a coffee or, if you really feel like treating yourself, practise basic hygiene?
Child abuse! Those five minutes just hot-wired that little baby brain to grow one day into an aggressive, hyperactive, non-empathetic teen who will surely mistake a gaming gun for a real-life weapon and kill you in your sleep.
Well, that’s what it feels like some days.
Just last week the New York
Times published a report saying putting down your phone could literally save your life.
Yes, it’s alarming. But it could also be alarmist.
We’re still in the infancy of the igeneration, we don’t really know what the effects will be and so we have to go with our gut. Yet even there we are compromised.
I was determined neither of my children would own their own screens until well into high school. Except, they need access to a device from Year 5 – and nobody touches Mum’s computer. And so ... iPads for everyone.
Even if I was to ban my children outright from technology, a full device detox, I’d be slammed from certain sectors.
Going full Amish would leave them socially isolated, educationally deprived and handicapped as future employees. It’s a brave new digital world and if they’re not part of it, they’re left out.
So, as parents, we just make it up as we go along. One week we’re told one hour of screen time a day is sufficient, the next it’s one hour per week. One week we’re told gaming makes serial killers, the next it’s that gaming makes a new generation of leaders.
Who knows? All we can do is instruct them that any mark they make technologically is permanent. Just look at the long list of fallen political wannabes who’ve learned that the hard way.
But do you know what? Even if we parents are doing this all wrong, we’re going to cope. We may not be operating our technology at optimal levels, but it still seems like a first-world problem.