Phones, these days, never seem to be far from the headlines. Whether it’s an ongoing determination to spend €9 million on phone pouches for secondary school students, or a co-ordinated parent effort to delay giving smartphones to preteens, there’s a popular belief that smartphones are the root of all evil.
And that we, the adults in the room, can stop the rot.
We have to try because paltry efforts by social media companies such as teen accounts and other minimal offerings don’t even begin to scratch the surface. Any more than spending €9 million on phone pouches will.
One thing teenagers are very good at, if they feel so inclined, is finding a way around the obstacles we put in their way. So it is, and so it always has been.
Should parents be checking their teenagers’ phones?
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Allow me to present exhibit A, your honour; your own teenage years and the things your parents never realised or knew. And if that doesn’t convince you, on account of having had a particularly angelic past, then I refer you to exhibit B, all the things your teenage friends and classmates managed to get up to while their parents remained blissfully unaware.
Where there’s a teenage will, there’s always a way.
None of this is to suggest that I too wouldn’t love a return to the days before phones and social media for our children and teens. A childhood spent more in the real world than the virtual one feels like an impossible dream. We’ve all seen the programmes, listened to the podcasts and read the articles about the worrying content our teenagers are being exposed to on social media. And so, trying to delay access to smartphones can feel like a no-brainer. But do we honestly think they only access and scroll these platforms, or can engage with strangers on their phones? What about the smart TVs, the iPads, tablets and laptops, and the game consoles? And what about these devices in their friends’ houses? Is Big Mother or Big Father always watching?
Our parents may not have known all that we got up to as teenagers, but an endless supply of strangers didn’t have access to us with just one swipe of a screen
Because that’s the thing about parenthood, we all do things our way. We all have different standards, ideals and beliefs about the best way to parent. And we’re all guilty of thinking, “not my child”.
But, of course, it’s always someone’s child.
It’s hard trying to parent teenagers at the best of times. Even harder when they inhabit a world we’re not as familiar with. But that’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card. We might not be as familiar with social media as our teenagers, but we must get as familiar with it as we can. We can’t protect if we don’t understand. And equally, we can’t protect, if we don’t know.
This brings us to the age-old – well social media age-old – question of, whether we should be checking our teenagers’ phones.
And so I turned to, (oh the irony of it), my social media to ask parents if they checked their teenagers’ phones. Almost half of the parents who replied said they didn’t and several offered explanations as to why they do or don’t. “One teen was bullied and the other had sexual content sent to them in a class chat, so it’s a must,” said one parent who checks her teens’ phones regularly. Another said she did it “in the vain hope of keeping up with what he’s tuned into”.
“It was part of the conditions she was allowed to have one,” said another parent.
The parents who didn’t check their teenagers’ phones gave reasons including “trust”, getting “out of the habit”, being “partly afraid what I’d see”, “privacy”, “not knowing where to start” and it being “too time-consuming”. Some explained they had been more particular about checking their eldest child’s phone as opposed to their younger children. Others said they felt they probably should be checking.
And while many parents said they found nothing of concern when checking their children’s phones, there were worrying discoveries for others. Parents explained that they had found, among other things, “porn”, “my daughter was being bullied”, “suicidal ideation”, “caught my son vaping”, “weight loss site”, and a child using “an app where people chat anonymously about you”. Things that some of the parents weren’t aware of until they checked their teenager’s phone.
Yes, it’s hard being the parent of teens.
Our parents may not have known all that we got up to as teenagers, but an endless supply of strangers didn’t have access to us with just one swipe of a screen. And for that very reason, along with the potentially harmful content teenagers are bombarded with daily, we cannot equate checking children’s phones to the sometimes compared to, reading of a diary.
To check or not to check. Is that even a question?
