A smartphone ban will allow our children to be themselves
I’M writing this to express my support for the Mail’s campaign to ban smartphones at schools.
I have two boys not yet at school, and I notice with alarm around me how kids as young as five have their telephones in hands and sit motionlessly quite absorbed and detached from what’s happening around them.
When did a telephone become essential to a child’s happiness?
I suppose it works on the basis of ‘everyone else has it’ but if everyone else smokes, drinks and does drugs, or maybe tortures animals for fun will we come on board too?
A child is called a child for a reason. We don’t let a baby play with a knife because we are parents and we are older and have the life experience to enable us to make the right decisions for this baby.
There is a reason why a person under 16 is called a child and is not allowed to vote.
That person’s intelligence is not fully developed and he/she does not have enough experience to make an informed decision. Phones must be taken from eightyear-olds in the same way knives should be taken from eight months olds. As simple as that.
A toy can be more than one thing, but there are limits to how many things a box or blocks can be. There are absolutely no limits within App Store or Google Play game selection. We must teach our children the concept of ‘enough’ as in enough dessert, enough play, enough tears and enough pocket money. Free downloadable apps override whatever we may try to teach.
It is borderline cruelty to make teachers at school deal with phone addiction on top of everything else. No phones at school at all. Let us make this law. LÁNA SAYAN, by email.
Sobering lesson
FOR someone who never shuts up about how harmless ‘a pint and a half really is’ with regards driving, why does Danny Healy-Rae not compile a list of deaths on the roads caused by alcohol and read it out in the Dáil, the parliament of the Irish people?
He might himself learn the value of education through moderation in his contention. ROBERT SULLIVAN, Bantry, Co.Cork.
Walk of shame
CONGRATULATIONS to journalist Tim Sebastian of Deutsche Welle, who interviewed Bertie Ahern. Over the years Bertie Ahern has got away with some very soft interviews. Bertie did not walk out of those soft interviews.
EDWARD MAHON, Clonskeagh, Dublin 14.