The policeman who invited TV cameras in to SPY on his family – and was horrified by what he saw
With four healthy, happy children and another on the way, Rob Kirk had always felt he was a ‘pretty good father’.
that is until he found his 11-year-old son watching what he calls ‘soft porn’, and heard his other son, 14, glumly admitting that he and his friends had ‘turned into sex maniacs’.
‘i’d describe myself as an old-fashioned dad,’ says Rob, a serving police officer. ‘Quite strict, maybe, but i think you have to be. i’ve always had high standards.
‘i never wanted my children to be those kids you see out on the street, behaving like little toerags.
‘i certainly never thought they’d be on the path to becoming the type of men who think it’s OK to make sexist comments, or to grope a woman. Our boys would never be like that. i thought we’d done pretty well.’
But, recently, his confidence in his own parenting skills — and his sons’ characters — has taken quite a battering.
that’s because some months ago Rob and his wife Donna, both 37, agreed to take part in an unusual Channel 4 programme that would give them an unprecedented insight into the lives of their children: Chloe, 17, Ryan, 14, George, 11 and Poppy, nine.
Cameras would fill their home in Chelmsford, Essex, for a week, and each family member would be assigned a camera crew to follow their every move — except to the bathroom (‘it was the only place you could escape,’ admits Donna. ‘Sometimes i’d go in there for ten minutes of sanctuary’).
they could all watch what everyone else was doing at any given moment, via tablet computers which were handed out by the production team.
Online and phone activity would be up for inspection, too — every website and every text message.
‘it gave us a licence to snoop on our kids, which you just don’t have in normal life,’ says Rob. After all, what parent wouldn’t secretly love to know what their children are really getting up to?
‘Maybe it was a bit sneaky of us, in hindsight,’ he adds. ‘But i knew i had nothing to hide. With the kids, though, we just didn’t know what we might find out.’
Of course, gaining this sort of knowledge risks opening a can of worms — it might be easier to remain in blissful ignorance.
So, what did Rob and Donna learn about their apparently angelic children, all of whom are polite, friendly and doing well at school? Suffice to say that if you are a parent, you will watch this programme with horror.
‘the biggest worry is the online stuff,’ says Rob. ‘there were pictures of half-naked women on their phones — pouting, provocative. it was soft porn, basically.
‘i suspected that Ryan, who is 14, might be at the age where this sort of stuff would be an issue. But George? George is 11 and quiet with it. he wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Yet he had these sort of images, too. he was following a woman on instagram who didn’t even live in this country.
‘i don’t mind admitting that i was devastated. i didn’t think my boys were like that. i’d always taught them to respect women, not to see them as objects.’
And this is far from the only revelation that throws the Kirk family into turmoil over the course of filming.
At one point, as Ryan and his friends play football in a local park, the footage veers into territory parents don’t usually have access to.
the conversation between Ryan — who isn’t allowed to swear, full stop — and his mates is ridden with expletives. they banter about sex acts. One of them goes off to defecate in the bushes, even though there is a public toilet nearby.
Just teenage japes? his father doesn’t see it that way. ‘i hit the roof,’ Rob reveals. ‘ i went charging there after them, and read them the Riot Act. it was just so galling to see.
‘i thought my children weren’t like the youths you see creating trouble. in my head, they were nice boys who, if you saw them playing in the park, you’d say, “haven’t they been well brought up.” Well, they have been well brought up — but they were still acting like toerags.’
his wife Donna was equally disappointed. ‘it’s really hard to see your children behave in a way that lets you down,’ she agrees. ‘And there was quite a bit of that. it made us all think, massively, about what we were doing.’
the programme, Spying On My Family, offers parents a wake-up call about the challenges of raising children in this digital age — and the Kirks are often painfully honest about where they could be doing better.
For police officer Rob, the worst shock seems to have come in discovering that some pockets of family life are simply, well, unpoliceable.
‘Part of the whole thing involved them monitoring our online use. At any time you could see who was on what device, and what they were looking at. they logged how long we were on. it was quite awful, really.
‘it turned out Donna and i lose hours every day to social media, as well as the kids. We averaged two hours a day as a family.’ this finding is sharply at odds with Rob’s idea of them as an ‘outdoorsy sort of family’.
More profoundly, he realises how little he actually knows about his children’s ‘second, secret life’ online.
‘i thought i was quite savvy about it,’ says Rob. i can use a computer and i know what Facebook is. But it’s no longer just about the internet; it’s about social media. Our kids are living in a social media age, and frankly people like me are a bit lost.
‘ We’d put all the parental controls in place. We’d warned them that people online wouldn’t necessarily be who they said they were. But i think, somewhere along the line, we took our eyes off the ball. i think many parents do — maybe most parents do.’
You might think the Kirks were over-confident when they started this experiment, but then again, you can see why. this is a nice, respectable, middle-class family, high on discipline and routine.
Donna, who is eight months pregnant, says they were all quite
‘The soft porn on their phones devastated me’ ‘I read those teenage toerags the Riot Act’
‘We’re all sex maniacs’, admits the 14-year-old
relaxed about the idea of the cameras moving in. ‘The kids took more persuading,’ she recalls. ‘But we’ve always been quite open. We have no secrets. We felt it was fine.’
The early stages went smoothly, although Donna says it was strange having a camera crew in tow at the supermarket.
‘For the first few days you were aware of them, but I don’t think we changed how we were.
‘I just thought “This must be quite boring for everyone”.’ In some ways it was. Certainly the kids soon tired of checking up on Mum and Dad’s activity.
‘Mostly the kids were interested in finding out what we did with the other kids when they weren’t there. There was a lot of “Oh, he had a milkshake. I never got a milkshake when I was out with you”.’
Both Rob and Donna say that at the start, it was Chloe, Rob’s daughter from a previous marriage, who they were most worried about. Living apart from them, and going through ‘ typical teenage girl’ worries, she could at times seem distant. ‘She’d always been Daddy’s little girl, but when her mum and I split when Chloe was six, she found it quite hard. She could be quite secretive, too. We were worried about her.’
Actually, Chloe’s ‘ secret’ life turns out to be one that makes Rob and Donna very proud. She is training to be a special needs teacher, and also has a work placement with vulnerable youngsters.
Rob cries when he sees her in action — highly capable, respected, loved by her young charges. ‘I broke down when I saw one of them call her beautiful, and stroke her hand,’ he says. ‘ It’s just a side of Chloe that I’d never seen before, and it was lovely.’
There are hairy moments, too, such as when Rob insists that they go fishing, even though Chloe hates it. Watching from home, Donna covers her eyes as their conversation gets more and more strained.
But Rob feels that, overall, the experience with Chloe was ‘ brilliant’. ‘ It opened everything up between us,’ he says. ‘We could talk about why we weren’t as close now, how we could make things better. ‘ Yes, with Chloe, having the cameras there actually put my mind at ease a bit.’
Youngest daughter Poppy is still at an age when observing her produces an endless fund of funny moments. Her parents chuckle as they watch her berating the family dog and bouncing on her bed.
Then there are the boys. Here, too, all goes well until Rob sits down to have a look at the sort of things his sons are doing online. On Ryan’s Instagram account, up pops a picture of a lithe girl.
‘I’ve never seen her before in my life. That young lady is in her underwear,’ says a shocked Rob. ‘How does Ryan know her?’ Rob is visibly gutted, and things get worse when he confronts Ryan, who reveals he has gone further than just ‘liking’ bikini shots.
‘I have asked for nudes, and I have received them,’ Ryan confesses, as his father’s head sinks into his hands. That’s when Ryan remarks, despondently, ‘We’ve all turned into bloomin’ sex maniacs’.
Little George’s phone is duly inspected and harsh questions are asked about why there are women ‘with their bodies hanging out of their clothes’.
Today, Rob does his best to articulate what a parent feels in this position. ‘It’s the powerlessness that gets to you,’ he says. ‘It was a kick in the stomach. I thought I was a great parent. Clearly not.
‘It made me furious that they were in this world — this overtly sexualised world — so early.’
As the experiment continues, Rob tries to take action. Lectures are delivered to the boys on how men should treat women, although he despairs because it seems the women themselves are very much part of the problem.
‘What have we come to when these girls feel they have to do that?’ he asks. ‘They think it’s the norm to take their clothes off, and the boys think it’s the norm, too.’
There’s a rather funny sequence where Rob decides that the boys must cook Donna a meal, as a way of showing more respect and consideration to women. She softens as she watches the preparations from her own tablet.
‘They aren’t bad boys,’ she says now. ‘Maybe we took our eye off the ball a little. It’s easily done.
‘When they first got their phones, we were all over them, monitoring what they were looking at. But it slips, and before you know it you find that you haven’t a clue.’
No more, they both say. After their brief taste of Big Brother living thanks to the TV cameras, Rob has turned into Surveillance Dad for good.
The Kirk household has become a secret-free zone (at least Rob hopes it has). The number one rule is that all devices are up for parental inspection at any time. He makes no apology for this strong-arm approach.
‘ I felt bad if I checked their phones before, as if I was doing something wrong. Now, it’s the rule in this house.
‘I pay the phone bill and the rule is that I can see what happens on that phone. All of it. And that rule will hold until I stop paying the phone bill, because if something bad happens — if they are caught sending nude pictures, and the police are involved — then my name is on the account.
‘I won’t have it, and now the boys know it. All these things have been thrashed out. I honestly think more parents should have these conversations with their kids, because I guarantee if our children were up to all this, then others will be, too. It’s time to stop tiptoeing about.’
Quite a call to arms — but perhaps a necessary one.
Spying On My Family airs on Channel 4 on September 6 at 9pm