‘I’ve resorted to extreme measures to break my kids’ phone obsessions’
God knows what their screen time weekly report notifications would read, if they hadn’t disabled them a long time ago
With my youngest, 11, it’s Tik Tok and FaceTime with her friends.
With my middle one, 14, it’s SnapChat with his current girlfriend.
And with my eldest, 18, it’s Tinder with, well, God only knows.
What I do know, is that my kids’ reliance on their mobile phones is becoming pathological.
All of them wander around the house with smart phones permanently fused to their hands like some kind of digital compass they would surely be lost without.
They walk in and out of the toilet staring at the screen, they come down to dinner staring at the screen and only put it down because they can’t feed themselves using the screen - although I’m sure Apple are on to a workaround for that.
God knows what their screen time weekly report notifications would read, if they hadn’t disabled them a long time ago.
However, one house rule that I managed to enforce was that they weren’t allowed their phones in their rooms overnight and there was a bed time phone amnesty in place where they would all, very reluctantly, hand over their device for overnight charging.
Now, I must confess that, occasionally, I “forgot” to charge one of the phones, so that at least I would get one of them to be a little more present the following morning at breakfast and I might hear something about their upcoming day, rather than being completely ignored, in favour of the latest YouTube video.
I never forgot to charge the same phone twice in one week and so no one seemed to get wise to my underhand tactics, however this emboldened me to take my chicanery to new levels.
Any phone left unguarded would be quickly kidnapped and whisked away to an undisclosed location, only to mysteriously reappear when I deemed that its owner had engaged with the real world for a sufficient amount of time.
Then one night in February, it happened. A big storm hit our rural village and we had a power cut.
“Dad!” They screamed in unison, oblivious to the sudden lack of light and heat and only concerned with the sudden lack of Wi-Fi.
“It’s okay, I’ll reboot the router,” said my eldest, unaware that no power was going to the router for it to be able to reboot and living in a 4G black hole it began to dawn on them that they were faced with the living hell of being off line and off their phones for an indefinite amount of time.
What followed was a halcyon period without the irresistible lure of the glowing brick, we all sat down for some dinner, then Pictionary, then a movie, then an actual conversation about the movie until we turned in for the night all the better for the shared family experience.
It was the one time I’ve cursed the efficiency of our local electricity supplier who had the power back on by the next morning and the phones were back.
However, it soon occurred to me that I could engineer power cuts whenever I wanted by simply flicking the kill switch on the consumer board and so I tried it a few weekends later to see what the reaction might be.
“Not another power cut?”
However, the moans were short-lived and there we were again actually enjoying one another’s company without interruption from the parasitic phone.
My wife thinks I’m mad and keeps telling me that I’m powerless to stop the invasive influence of the smart phone on family life and that it’s like holding back the tide with a broom. I know she’s right and they’ll soon get wise to my fake power cuts, just like they got wise to me not charging and hiding their phones.
I probably need to recognise that my own behaviour is becoming slightly obsessional too, especially as I’ve just got word of a 4G mast being planned to service the village and my first thought was of angry letters of objection to my local MP, placards and other out of character behaviours.
I also realise if the mast gets planted then the game’s definitely up and I’ll just have to find another way to communicate with the kids. I guess I can always FaceTime them.
Read last week's column: ‘My obsession with having a baby daughter is making me a terrible mum’