My children are digitally illiterate

I’ve been such a bad mother, my children are digitally illiterate. Many years ago, I read an article about the plight of elderly widowers who, without a wife to cook for them, slowly starved to death. Having been fed by capable women all their lives, they had never learnt such basic survival skills as how to boil an egg, or peel the cellophane off a ready meal. 

 

That article still haunts me because I, too, could not survive on my own. If my husband died, I would lose not only the love of my life, but also my internet connection. I could feed myself all right, but who would run my software updates? Who would check the server configuration, or rummage in my operating system to fix a bug? And — assuming that by then we’ll all be surrounded by the Internet of Things — who will reprogram my smart-fridge if it tries to make me drink semi-skimmed milk, or teach my washing-machine never to mix the whites with the coloureds? 

 

The obvious answer should be: my children. According to a new survey, half of British parents now pay their children to do “digital chores”. Traditional household jobs, such as mowing the lawn or doing the washing-up, have been replaced by hi-tech tasks such as setting up a new mobile phone, downloading photographs or recording TV shows. Parents are willing to pay as much as £20 (Dh114.45) a go for such valuable work, and a third of children earn extra cash by helping their grandparents with bewildering technology. 

 

I commend these families on their far-sightedness. And I see now that I have been a fool. My children are just as technologically clueless as I am. Being the dutiful middle-class mother, I have rationed their screen time so frugally that they still can’t find their way round an iPad, let alone a proper computer. 

 

My eldest is, I believe, the only seven-year-old in Britain who doesn’t know how to play Minecraft. I dread to think what that’s done for his playground cred. And for what? So they’ll learn to read? By the time they’re grown-up, reading will be defunct: people will communicate in emoticons, or through brainwave transmitters. I could hardly have bequeathed my offspring a more redundant skill if I’d trained them in clog-whittling. 

 

 

Following in Jobs’ footsteps

 

The irony is, I was only trying to be more like Steve Jobs. The late Apple boss famously refused to let his children play with the iPad he invented, on the grounds that it might stifle their creativity. Bill Gates also set strict limits on his children’s screen time. 

 

Every day these conscientious fathers left their children playing with real-world poster paints or Fuzzy Felts, and went into the office to build a brave new world in which, before long, no one without basic knowledge of JavaScript will be able to open their front door. 

 

The Jobs children at least have the advantage of genetics. Even coming late to technology, one imagines they’ll have an innate understanding of what to do when Game of Thrones takes ages to buffer on Apple TV. Not so the rest of us. My parents still haven’t mastered the video recorder. And now I, at the age of 44, find myself slipping the moorings of modernity. 

 

Simple pleasures, such as listening to music, already bring me out in a cold sweat of incompetence. And this is just the beginning. When the end times come, and the robots enslave us all, what use will it be to know how to boil an egg? Or, for that matter, to have read all the classics? Throw away your books, my children, and pick up an Xbox. Only the geeks will survive.

 

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015