Keep some ‘old fashioned’ ways

Last week, TV presenter Kirsty Allsopp, featured heavily in the news after revealing that she smashed her children’s iPads after they broke the rules she had set on screen time.

Of course, like many other parenting issues, the world and his wife were keen to wade in and share their thoughts and opinions.

After chatting about it twice on local radio last week and sharing my views as a parent, who is a heavy technology user due to the nature of my job, it really got me thinking about screen time, as well as how we allow our kids to use social media and technology.

Let’s be honest, as a parent, sometimes screen time can be a saviour! If you’re on a long car journey or you need five or ten minutes to finish making tea, then it can be the perfect distraction that helps avoid the dreaded words of ‘are we nearly there yet’ or ‘is tea ready yet?’.

However, there are times when seeing kids on iPads and using other forms of technology just saddens me.

The amount of times we’ve been out for tea and there have been multiple families in the same restaurant, all glued to phones and iPads having minimal (at best) conversation with each other.

Now I’m not saying I’ve never let my daughter have a cheeky look on YouTube or search something on Google while we’ve been out (I’m also no parenting expert), but we all live such busy, fast paced lives that times like a meal out with the family are surely about interacting with each other and not spending such precious time starring at a screen when the most important things in the world are right in front of you.

I spotted a quote recently that said ‘don’t miss out on your own life because you’re scrolling through someone else’s’, and this couldn’t be more true.

I love technology probably more than most ... I have to, it’s what 95% of my business is built upon, and I fully appreciate that our kids need to be fluent in it in order to live in the wonderfully modern world we’ve created, but I hope that as time moves on and we continue to electronically evolve, we hang on to some of our ‘oldfashioned’ ways.

Whether it’s leaving our phones at home from time to time when we go out or just sitting down with the people who are important to use and having a chat.

Let’s never totally swap the X-Box for a game of Monopoly or dominoes and let’s not make Facebook more important than face to face.

“Let’s be honest, as a parent, sometimes screen time can be a saviour” KATIE BULMER-COOKE