Parents know all about compromise. It becomes one of those things that comes along with becoming a parent that you're absolutely bloody awful at to begin with, but eventually start to get a handle on as the years pass by.
So now that C has entered Tweendom, kicking and screaming (a lot of screaming, usually when asked to leave the house for any reason at a weekend or to eat anything for dinner other than pizza or pasta!) along with that the dreaded Social Media peer pressure, the need for a mobile phone, and with it a whole smorgasbord of horror has descended upon ReadItDaddy Towers like a green cloud of slightly farty-smelling gas.
We had a "Parents meet and greet" session at school and I came away from it feeling like the world's most unreasonable parent. Though C has a phone, we've never let the thing anywhere near an internet connection, but listening to most parents of kids in her year it seems we're probably the only holdouts left. Worse still, most parents seem to think it's really not that big a deal. "What harm could it do letting them communicate?"
It's not that we're particular 'victorian' in attitude, it's not that we're technophobes (hell, in my day job, it's practically my business to know how 'leaky' most popular social media platforms are, and how virtually every Fortune 500 company out there is only in business because they trade in the most valuable commodity in the modern world - your details).
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| The minimum age restrictions on popular social media platforms. So basically, what the hell are 11 year olds doing near any of these? |
But conveying that to a child isn't easy. Conveying it to their parents is even harder as they really do have an attitude along the lines of "I'll only worry about this AFTER something happens, not before" and for the most part they are not interested in the minimum age requirements for stuff like WhatsApp or SnapChat, let alone YouTube or any of the others.
Very few parents or children understand the 'wicking effect' of an online presence (this has been described in many academic studies and papers, and demonstrated in different ways on just about all the social media platforms you can name off the top of your head).
What goes online quite often stays online, despite any official attempts to ensure otherwise, and having seen the raw end of what happens when your photos or information are shared online against your consent, it's extremely difficult to ever erase anything online entirely, and ensure it's really gone for good.
At the root of this is that word at the top of this article. Compromise. We are now in a position where we're trying to work out how we can ensure C doesn't get left out of her peer group without just flatly stating "hang it all, let her online, all the other kids are there so if you can't beat 'em, join 'em". Being left out of a peer group, even one as stupid sounding as the one with all the kids in it who DO bring snack money in to school to spend on the vending machines vs the kids whose parents (OK, just us) send them into school with a healthy-ish snack that didn't cost an arm and a leg, seems to be the be all and end all for kids of a certain age. The social media thing is just another part of that, so what do you do as a parent who wants to protect their kids from something that could potentially stay with them for the rest of their school career?
One slight glimmer of hope came from a parent who has kids both in C's year and year 9. "Most of the chat on their whatsapp group is so bloody inane that kids have ended up muting each other. Does anyone really need to see "HI, LOL, POOPEMOJI" 100 times during a quiet evening?"
So are we just worrying about nothing? Or should we just tough it out, or somehow come up with a magical solution that somehow offers a compromise that doesn't suck for either side.