One of the many (many, many) downsides of life in the digital age is the amount of horsepower being generated online by parents working assiduously towards obtaining a master’s degree in Haranguing People About All The Things They’re Doing Better Than You.
I’m sure it was always thus, although at least during the internet-free 1980s you got a consolation instant coffee at playgroup when someone rolled in wearing a pristine white dress and spent the next half-hour extolling the virtues of Fab and giving your filthy urchin-kids the side-eye.
Mind that flaming sambuca, but at least there’s a pathway back to sobriety. If your child’s “drug of choice” involves a smartphone, good luck with that. Credit: iStock/Marija Ercejovac
You know what the other excellent thing about the 1980s was? No smartphones. No endless doom loops featuring children who, having recently mastered the use of their opposable thumbs, immediately began campaigning to deploy them on an iPhone of their very own, despite a wealth of evidence suggesting their time would be equally well spent standing in traffic and playing a spirited game of chicken with the nearest bus.
No one’s interested in watching a victory lap completed by someone who’s still in the trenches. In that spirit, let me say this: judging your decisions, or anyone else’s, requires a level of emotional investment that I am woefully incapable of. If this was a battlefield and the parenting police were closing in on you, I’d be sitting in the middle, doing the cryptic crossword and speculating to myself about the answer to 28 down.
However, in a hypothetical scenario where I was forced to choose between handing my 12-year-old his own smartphone, or watching him down a shot of flaming Sambuca, I would unhesitatingly opt for the latter. Furthermore, I would gladly ignite it myself, before offering him a chaser of Winfield Blues and a lighter.
I’m not sure when I traversed the godless terrain between having an embarrassing parent and being an embarrassing parent, but it’s done. And my kids can actually contact me in an emergency, although they would probably attempt to negotiate with an advancing axe murderer rather than risk social suicide by pulling out the world’s most old-school dumb phone.
What I would really like to do now is drown out the noise surrounding Other People’s Kids’ iPhones. The next set of parents who come to my house claiming the only reason little Johnny has a smartphone is that they’ve just finished upgrading their device, rendering the old phone obsolete and therefore ripe for handing down, will find themselves hog-tied to one of my dining chairs and forced to read a curated collection of posts from my kids’ class WhatsApp groups. Spoiler alert: the athletics carnival is next week, and everyone is confused about how to register for the 800m.
As ever, I arrived at my extremist position on smartphones for the under-18 set by deploying a potent mix of contrarianism and unvarnished self-interest. In another life, I would’ve made an excellent Third World despot.
Why I’d rather give my kid a flaming Sambuca than a smartphone
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04.04.2024
One of the many (many, many) downsides of life in the digital age is the amount of horsepower being generated online by parents working assiduously towards obtaining a master’s degree in Haranguing People About All The Things They’re Doing Better Than You.
I’m sure it was always thus, although at least during the internet-free 1980s you got a consolation instant coffee at playgroup when someone rolled in wearing a pristine white dress and spent the next half-hour extolling the virtues of Fab and giving your filthy urchin-kids the side-eye.
Mind that flaming sambuca, but at least there’s a pathway back to sobriety. If your child’s “drug of choice” involves a smartphone, good luck with that. Credit: iStock/Marija Ercejovac
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