If you ever do that again, I’ll take your cell phone away!
How many times have you said that to your son or daughter? Too many.
You hide the phone and then forget where you hid it. They throw a conniption fit and keep hounding you until you throw your own conniption and everyone’s mad.
They subsequently track down their phone by using more technology. By then you’re busy doing something else and they happily continue texting or snap chatting, hoping you won’t notice.
It’s a losing battle.
Our children’s lives revolve around their phones and they sadly gauge their self-worth by the number of “likes” they have. They compare themselves to others who slap on a ton of makeup and post “selfies” to make them look older and sexy. The next thing you know they want to start dating at age 11, or want to get a belly button piercing. They promise they won’t wear revealing tops to show off this piercing, but you both know that is the lie of the century.
They won’t take a traditional sit-down lunch to school because that’s not cool, and they have to have $120 leggings from Lululemon or else they will die. (This athletic wear company is the bane of parents’ existence and has no doubt made many of us poorer.)
Take away your child’s phone and they don’t know what to do with themselves. (I guess we can say the same thing about some adults.)
“Use your imagination,” you say. But they don’t know how, complaining they are bored. Want to come for a walk with the dog? Nope. Want to play cards? Nope. Want to . . . nope.
This is serious, folks. Our children have been brainwashed by technology and what they see on Youtube. If I hear another child acting like Miranda Sings, I will commit myself to the nearest asylum.
Technology and idiotic behaviour on our screens are winning over our children, who can barely think for themselves anymore. Parents who wait too long (like I did) to nip this in the bud face an uphill battle in trying to detox their kids from this terrible addiction.
Remember, no more than two hours of screen time per day, but try enforcing that. You’d have better luck evicting a badger from its den.
What is a parent to do? Send their child to a technology detox centre for $500 an hour? Maybe send them to grandma’s house, where grandma doesn’t even own a computer and thinks Snapchat is a new card game.
Or maybe to Uncle Ed’s, where if you say Wifi he’ll think you mean sci-fi and tell you he hasn’t got a TV. But he’s got a transistor radio and a few Lawrence Welk records. Ya, let’s send them to Uncle Ed’s.
Lyonel Doherty, editor
