On the Coast – Families Issue 100 I June/July 2019 | Seite 22

Parenting
in the digital age
BY JAYNIE MALONEY
i
Pads, iPhones X-Box, Playstations,
Apple watches and basically anything
that plugs in has become a never
ending challenge in my house. Most days
I find myself sounding like an old lady,
talking about the good old days. You
know, the days when as kids we played
in the street with our friends until it got
dark, the days when we would play eye
spy on long car trips, when we would go
to restaurants and, wait for it – talk.
The days when our parents felt no guilt
at all about our complaints of being bored.
They weren’t our entertainment managers
and they weren’t going to pretend to be,
they would answer cries of “I’m bored’
with “go outside”, because according to
parents of our generation, being outside
solved all of our problems. I have to say, I
think they were onto something.
Parenting has changed. The
challenges are different. And one of
the biggest challenges, and my personal
parenting nemesis – is technology.
Screens, devices and all of the multi-
layered problems they bring with them –
from social media and the social pressure
and anxiety that it brings with it, to our
children having the entire internet at
their fingertips and them being exposed
to things we cannot see or monitor, to
gaming, the instant gratification and the
myriad of other risks and impacts that
come with kids and technology. How
old should they be? How much time is
too much time? How do we know when
there is a problem? How do we supervise
them but give them privacy at the same
time? With every app, every website,
every new device comes a whole new
set of questions, and as a parent, all we
ever want to do is the right thing for our
kids but this stuff doesn’t come with an
instruction manual. Perhaps we could
google one, on a device? Anyone?
For a long time I tried to hold out and
deny technology in our house, but as my
boys got older, it was harder to avoid. I
have always had fairly strict boundaries
around device time, but over time these
were pushed and stretched, and then
school holidays would come and throw
any existing structure into chaos.
One time I was so overwhelmed and
frustrated and I felt I had lost control,
devices were creeping into times when
they weren’t supposed to and I couldn’t
seem to pull it back – so in desperation I
loaded every single device and remote
control into my car and took it work, and
left it there for 3 weeks. I felt like I needed
and they needed a detox, and we needed
a chance to reset those boundaries that
had slipped, so we did. It felt extreme, but
I didn’t know what else to do.
I guess the point here, is that this beast
is not going anywhere. I am not saying
that there are no benefits to technology,
because there are many – but I am saying
that children and teens don’t have the
brain development to regulate their use
of devices, or the maturity to handle
everything that they see, so that bit is our
job. It has to be. According to David
Gillespie, author of “Teen Brain” our kids
need us to step up and take charge. He
says that in less than a decade, we have
totally changed the future of the human
race, and we have done it without so
much of a backward glance. He goes on to
say that what he found in a nutshell was:
1. The biology of puberty makes the teen
brain uniquely fragile. It makes teens
susceptible to addictions that can last
for life and usher in mental illness
2. Parenting is much more permissive
and parents need to harden up to save
their kids
3. Unfettered access to screens is driving
an epidemic of addiction, depression
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