Face it, our children’s online addiction suits the parents, too

Now the holidays are in full swing, dare I ask how your Easter Fortnite is going? Has your offspring’s day out to the museum (or even into the back garden) been cancelled until further notice due to Roblox?

If they’re not up in their rooms Snapchatting, you’ll find them hunched on the sofa flicking through Instagram, manically “liking” other people’s lives instead of living their own.

Seriously, if I had a fiver for every time a fellow parent has complained their child is “obsessed” with a hand-held screen, I’d have enough moolah for a booze-fuelled digital detox at one of those Sam Smith’s pubs where mobiles have been banned.

So now we’ve identified the problem staring us all in the face. The solution? Well, that’s staring us in the face, too.

Unplug the Wi-fi. Confiscate their playstations. Do a Kirstie Allsopp and hurl their expensive technology in the bin. Ta-dah!

Soon they’ll be making rocket ships out of old milk cartons at the kitchen table, writing to their MPS about climate change, ingeniously sewing aprons and teaching themselves Schubert on the piano.

Except that’s not true, is it? We all know what parenting experts say about boredom being character-building for children. It may well be, long-term.

Short-term, and for anyone with kids over 11, it’s a right old pain in the arts and crafts. Say what you like about the evils of online addiction, it keeps ‘em quiet. Opiate of the masses and all that.

There now, I’ve broken the omertà at the heart of A Generation Hooked on

Social Media: it suits us, the grown-ups, a little too much.

On a good day, slacker parents barely have to produce a meal, so involved and invested are the kids in their parallel universe. How great is that?

We say things to our friends like, “I have no idea what they’re doing up there,” even though we absolutely do know what they’re up to.

But the truth is, we’re tired after a long day at work and we never did get to finish that sudoku or catch up with the news on our phones. Can’t we have some downtime too? Where’s the harm?

If you are genuinely wondering about the harm or at least the impact of social media obsession, look no further than the extravagantly ascetic chief executive of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, whose daily routine includes fasting for 22 hours a day, ice baths and a five-mile commute to his office on foot.

The 42-year-old, who earned an estimated $80million (£61million) from the sale of shares in his mobile payment firm, Square, also meditates for an hour a day, he told the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast this week. All this to keep himself at the top of his Twitter game. It would be nice to think of this as yet another cautionary tale to tell our kids about how the Twittersphere sucks the joy out of reality, but I for one am too dang exhausted.

I swear, if I had a wife, she would be all over this. She’d be a 21st-century version of Keeley Hawes in The Durrells (but less stylish so as not to show me up), patrolling the domestic front like the home guard, monitoring computer usage like a hawk, shooing the children outside and locking the back door until they’ve whittled sticks into ocean-going liners and tended to the veg patch.

She doesn’t exist. But even imagining her brings a mawkishly sentimental tear to my eye.

Why? Because most of us dualincome couples are too wiped out to come home and play policeman.

No, that’s not a game. Not even a saucy role-play. Who’s got the energy for that, either?

When both parents work full-time, something has to give. What that is varies from family to family; weekly fresh towels, after-school activities, a diet that extends beyond the chicken goujons-pasta-sausages-pastadeliveroo-on-a-saturday continuum.

Maybe your biggest challenge is finding the head space to delay wine o’clock for 20 minutes (10 if you hurry) so you can read your youngest a bedtime story, even though he’s a bit too old to need it. He just enjoys it.

Or is the challenge simply listening – really listening – to your teenager’s angst that may be daft in the grand scheme of things, but isn’t to her?

Few parents can wangle the full Easter break off, so we somehow stitch together a patchwork quilt of paid-for childcare, grandparents and play dates.

And then, having somehow pulled that out of the hat, we feel entitled to let them loose online when we get home, reasoning that they haven’t been on their screens all day.

It’s a treat! But for whom? I say this not by way of reproach but confession, with a side order of triple-fried guilt.

My husband – most husbands – don’t do guilt and just let them get on with it. One man’s laissez-faire is another woman’s complete laissez-unfair.

Mothers are different. I’m not saying that makes us morally superior, although (whisper it) it does, just that we get more antsy about screen use, but instead of shouting at our children we shout at our spouses for not shouting at the children.

Like anything that’s worth doing, change takes effort. Spiriting away your kids’ devices will not end in carnage. It will commence in carnage. Then it will evolve into something else; creativity, connection, maybe even family togetherness. That’s the hope.

If we can’t get through these two weeks without tearing our kids away from virtual reality, what on God’s earth will happen in the summer?

Easter is traditionally a time for renewal. I for one shall do my best to replace those infernal handsets with something more virtuous. Just not yet. I still have a sudoku to finish.

When both parents work full-time, something has to give