Rumbled! The contraband phone I found hidden in PJs
My husband has often said he believes I would be a good prison guard.
Mr Candy is a big softie, so he has a reluctant admiration for my iron willpower in the face of insubordination and general naughtiness. ‘ nobody would escape,’ he says, ‘because you’re so suspicious you’d spot a prisoner planning to dig out with a spoon before he even stole the spoon.’
he is not wrong. but this is not because I am by nature incredibly well-disciplined: quite the opposite. It’s because I’m the prisoner planning to steal the spoon. you can’t ‘trick a tricker’, as they say.
and so it is with my teenagers. Mr Candy crumbles in the face of their rule-breaking tactics.
The right royal battle of ‘phonegate’, which has raged on for nearly a month, has almost broken him. but I’m standing firm and continue to take their mobiles away at 9pm on school nights. This is to help them sleep properly and step out of the relentless pressure to be connected with everyone and everything.
I’ve read many studies about how bad 24-hour mobile access is for them and indeed just last week u.s. researchers linked constant teen phone use to depression, anxiety and obesity.
as expected, a righteous fury descended over the house (mainly the kitchen) when we initiated the electronic curfew. My 14- year- old and 12-year- old told me I had ruined their lives, that their friends would desert them, and that they would ‘have to spend all day at school in the toilets avoiding everyone’, so shameful was their lack of phone time in the early hours.
Then they tried every trick in the book to beat the ban, from hiding phones in PJ bottoms to pretending the phone was lost or broken. One of them would even retire to the loo at 8.55pm pretending to have a ‘poorly tummy’ so she could lock the door and sit with the phone as late as possible.
They spun me giant stories about the phone being crucial for homework or they would face a firing squad, they told me traumatic tales of tragedies their friends faced if they couldn’t stay in touch through the night. I was most impressed, but stayed one step ahead because I was once a smarty pants teenage girl myself.
Phonegate escalated this week with a new development; fellow mums have begun to follow my lead and remove phones at bedtime. It’s a trend spreading faster than the winter vomiting bug.
This caused a blazing row at home, one so bad Mabel, five, voluntarily handed her over her toy barbie phone with a look of fear in her eyes. ‘It’s on mute,’ she added for some illogical reason.
yet my older girls are going to sleep earlier, they have not become social pariahs, they spend more evening time with us and go to bed more relaxed and less distracted. They have their phones Friday and saturday nights and I do not have the passcodes for them, so their private worlds are still private for them.
I read in the news this week that Cornish mum Karly Tophill’s experiment to ban the phone for a year from her 13-year-old has an extremely positive effect on him (not least his agreeing to be photographed with his mum for a newspaper which is rare for teen boys).
her son has been phone- free for six weeks and is more talkative, co- operative and happier in himself. he takes half the time to get ready for school and, miracle of miracles, helps with household chores. It’s been so effective she’s reduced the yearlong ban to three months, moderation being the key in all things in life I think.
she’s also come up with the idea of ‘ family phone- free Fridays’. This means all adults in the house are banned from using their phones and could work for those of you not brave enough to implement the 9pm cut-off.
I admit for me it’s been tough, and has changed the dynamic between myself and my eldest, but parenting isn’t a popularity contest, it’s a giant responsibility to mould what you hope will be the best-loved human in the world.
and if I have learned one thing after 14 years of bringing up four kids it’s to listen to your instincts. Would your parents have let you stay on the phone to your mates until the small hours? Would they have let you talk to strangers you’ve never met after dark on a school night? Of course not.