THE PHONY TEEN

Three years ago, we gifted our daughter A a mobile phone. H and me thought it would be a good idea to keep track of her. She went to her classes for dance and drawing in the far end of the day and usually returned by 8 in the night. So it would be useful, or so we thought.

Within the next three days we had a phony(!) teenager in our hands. She was always on the phone. She was constantly texting or speaking to someone on the phone. Curiously every call would end when either one of us entered the room or the texting would happen just when we turned around. And then one day we discovered that she had carried the phone to school. There were videos of her happily enjoying a  joke with her friends on the school bus. 

We panicked! We ran searches through the phone. We deleted all the videos. We confiscated the phone and we rested; assured that we had everything under control. That day she went to her dance class without the phone.

H (in the ‘I told you mood’): We grew up without phones. She doesn’t need one. I told you not to buy one for her. But you didn’t listen.

Me: Yes! (sigh).Kids need to be in touch with technology. I thought we should teach them to handle stuff.

But later that day when it was way past 8.30 p.m and A hadn’t returned from her dance class, H and me panicked again.

Me: (in the ‘I told you mood’): I told you...if she had the phone we would know where she was now. I told you she needs the phone. I told you not to let a teenage girl without her phone.

H: O.K O.K. will go and see.

So H marches off before I could start my next ‘I told you so’ sentence to hunt out A. He reaches the class only to find her still dancing in the class. They come back home.

A (now in the’ I told you mood’): And that’s why I told you I need the phone. It would have saved you of so much trouble!

H, A and me have a heart to heart talk about the phone and realise that we all had gone overboard. A was overjoyed and we had over reacted. So we decided to set out rules for the phone.

So the phone remains at home when she is in school. She gets it when she goes to her classes and of course it’s prepaid. Oh yes, we had to get her the free sms pack.

There seems to be peace in the paradise.

Mind bender: Keeping kids away from technology is not the solution . The more we try to keep them away from it, the more they will want it. So it’s essential to set rules for how these things operate in our houses. Kids will be connected to their friends. We too were, when we were children. The only difference is that we did not depend on technology so much as they do. The media is different. We spent real time, they spend virtual time. It is our mindsets that we need to negotiate with. Observe children and you will notice that they handle technology in a far superior way than we do. So it’s time for us to handle ourselves so that we can deal with them in a mature fashion