Last week I wrote about how addicted we can be to our cellphones and then several days later, I received the following email.
“Dear Carole, I read your business column in Gulf News about cellphone addiction with great interest and I hope you can help me. My 15-year (old) daughter is always on the phone, and I mean really always. She goes to bed with her cellphone and is barely sleeping at night.
“She is addicted to sending SMS and chatting on WhatsApp. When I insist that she sits down at the dinner table with us as a family, she sits there just looking into space and doesn’t know how to talk to us anymore. She isn’t working well in school and her grades have gone right down. My husband and I had great hopes for her but they are now shattered.
“What can I do? We are at a complete loss.”
Where is this taking us all? Is the next generation going to become a group of adults who cannot string more than two words together or who can only speak in three-letter acronyms?
Are Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter the new age of communication in which face-to-face contact has been eliminated?
Cellphones and digital games are a wonderful part of growing up these days, but they shouldn’t be allowed to turn our children into non-thinking and non-doing robots who become incapable of forming and maintaining human relationships.
Collecting 500 ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ on Facebook is actually meaningless. They’re not really friends at all. It’s just a digital quantity rather than human quality.
Of course, children want to belong and be part of a group and without a phone they may feel excluded. But this is often detrimental to their social skills and physical play. A digital game may help time pass but there is no creativity, imagination or physical effort involved.
As a parent, are you concerned that your child is becoming a reactive robot? If so, then maybe you need to talk to him or her, seriously, to ensure that digital time on cellphone, tablet or computer is strictly limited. Chocolate is nice but eating it all the time will make you physically sick — and the same is with SMS, games and chats: too much and you also get sick as your brain loses the ability to think.
You need to establish strict basic rules and insist that your child adheres to them rigorously — for their own development. Tell your children that because family life is very important to everyone in your house, you and all the family are going to have ‘technology free’ times to connect with each other when all cellphones have to be switched off completely.
‘But for how long must my phone be switched off? — your child will ask.
The answer isn’t easy to give as there are many factors to take into consideration and a part of 21st century parenting goes with disagreements over cellphone usage and video games. One family will always be different from another. However, ask yourself the following.
Does your child:
• Withdraw from family discussions, or rush eating so that they can sit alone on their phone?
• Stop going out with their friends as they don’t want to leave their games console?
• Rush their homework so that they can have their ‘electronics time’?
• Hide the truth about how much time is being spent online?
• Invite friends over and sit and play video games with them all day?
• Feel isolated, bored and unhappy when not playing games or using their phone?
• Take their phone with them to bed and hide it under their pillow?
• Wake up in the morning totally exhausted because they have been playing games or chatting late at night?
• Throw temper tantrums when restrictions are implemented?
These are some of the signs that you might expect, but let us not forget that if they see you and your spouse as their role models and either or both of you spend ‘all day’ on your phone or surfing the web, then they will automatically be reassured that it is normal behaviour!
Key points:
* Extensive cellphone use can affect human behaviour
* Face-to-face contact is vastly superior to using emoticons.
* The digital world is not real — when power goes it goes also.
