‘So smash away Kirstie, until someone comes up with a better solution’
MOST parents, however judgemental some are being on social media, must surely have a sneaking sympathy for Kirstie Allsopp revealing how she smashed her children’s iPads as punishment when they broke her rules on screen time.
The Location Location Location presenter confessed all on air to Jeremy Vine, even demonstrating how she smashed the devices against a table leg in front of her two sons.
Kirstie said sons Bay, 12, and Oscar, 10, had broken the boundaries she had set for playing games like Fortnite on them.
I hope the destruction took place in the heat of the moment and not as some weirdly concocted ritual in a moment of calm; that would indeed be slightly spooky and less understandable.
Some took to Twitter (which Kirstie appears to have left in the predictably messy online aftermath of her confession) to accuse her of being destructive and having the luxury to wreck items which she should have confiscated and donated instead – presumably to people more deserving of an addiction to online games.
Others said it was an example of bad parenting and she had taught her sons that if something annoys you it’s OK to destroy it.
Let whoever has never been a bad parent cast the first stone at the nearest pricey screen bought with the blood, sweat and tears of downtrodden workers.
As someone whose children are now too old to let me smash their belongings, even if I wanted to, and believe me I have wanted to neutralise a few things in my time, I can fully understand Kirstie’s frustration.
It must have been rather frightening for her sons to watch their mother break their iPads, but the woman is only human after all, even if she does command a vast salary enabling her to effectively bin a few hundred quid in one satisfying crunch.
Maybe she rightly feared the even greater destructive force of addiction to on-screen games.
A few weeks ago I spoke to a therapist who works with primary school aged children in Cardiff who are addicted to gaming. I sat with my jaw dropping as she detailed how one primary school aged boy was being weaned off a habit which saw him on a variety of screens for at least 14 hours a day making it impossible for him to get enough sleep or attend school anymore.
I was hoping to do a story on this, but in the event, it was deemed too personal and tricky. The boy had a very serious and potentially damaging addiction and being exposed was the last thing he or his family needs. Even if we didn’t name them. This is an extreme case but he is not the only one.
Aghast at the scale of his problem I asked his therapist, naively, if his family was “dysfunctional”. The alltoo-fair reply was “how do you class dysfunctional?”
His parents, it turned out, had only done what most parents do – they bought him a screen, warned him not to spend too long on it, or other screens, set some boundaries and then, failed to enforce them until it was too late. There for the grace of God go all of us parents. Some people are more addictive than others. Who of us can say we have not been either tempted to, or used, screens to steal a few moments respite from young people? Whether it’s putting on a film for them while you chat to friends at a dinner party, or install screens so they can watch television on a long journey or simply not bothering to find out what they’ve been up to in their room for hours, no parents, surely, can claim to be 100% innocent of encouraging their kids to use screens.
Online screen game abuse may be another thing, but one thing can lead to another, just as one drink, one biscuit, one cigarette can lead to another.
Recently my 20-year-old daughter decided to come off much of the social media she’d been on. Her phone was stressing her out.
There is much that is good about screens but she was finding it overwhelming and impossible to respond to the flurry of messages and 24/7 information pouring in via her notifications.
She’s not an addict, but she was finding her phone was literally making her feel ill. The noise was crowding out real life and face to face conversation.
Maybe I should have smashed the phone we bought her years ago instead of having endless wellmeaning conversations with her about using it sensibly? Who’s to know if a spot of wanton destruction might not have had more impact than spoken words?
Then again, like Kirstie, her children and her critics, I probably spend too much time on screens myself. Who am I to tell others what to do?
Today’s parents and children have been thrust into this screen world as the first generation of novices. How are any of us to know whether what we are negotiating and how we do that is effective?
Greater tech brains than ours are paid many millions of dollars collectively to make these devices, the apps, games and social media accessed on them as addictive as possible. And it works.
Kirstie may have done better to attack the source of her sons’ overuse of their iPads – but just who are those nameless, faceless powers-that -be and where do they reside? They may be lurking in Silicon Valley, they may be closer to home. Wherever they are, they are using insidious powers to lure us and our young people on screen and keep us there.
It doesn’t matter how many iPads Kirstie or any of us smash, the genie is out of the bottle.
The task for our children and future generations is not just how to create world peace and prosperity but how to get us all off our screens so that we can learn how to communicate effectively again.
So smash away, Kirstie, until someone comes up with a better solution.