OPINION:With no diaries to read, parents now need an IT expert to find out what their children are up to, writes Orna Mulcahy
WE’D PLANNED to start the new year with a blanket ban on the Xbox, but it didn’t happen until yesterday when, having read about the trial of the Ohio teenager who shot both his parents after a similar ban, I got down on hands and knees and started ripping out cables, saying: “That’s it, it’s going. You can have it back after the Leaving.”
Admittedly, things hadn’t got so bad as in the Ohio household, where 17-year-old Daniel Patric spent up to 18 hours a day on Halo 3, killing aliens.
When his dad threatened to confiscate the game, he snapped. Or rather, he went off, got a gun and went into his parents’ bedroom, saying: “Close your eyes, I’ve got a surprise for you guys,” recalls his father, who survived a bullet to the head. He killed his 43-year-old mother outright. That’s gratitude for you.
So yes, I’m worried about the many hours spent on Call of Duty, the Xbox game that seems to involve nothing more than soldiers killing each other with realistic sound effects in a vaguely Middle Eastern landscape. I’m not sure how long the ban will last. Passing a woman on the street the other day, I heard her say to her little boy: “If you don’t say sorry to your sister, there’ll be no treats all year!”
Really? There’ll come an evening when the Xbox will quietly be reinstated and it’ll be days before it’s even noticed. Our house has become a series of different zones in which children and adults gaze at various screens, whether it’s MSN, Bebo, Nintendo DS, Nickelodeon, Prime Time or the New York Times online. Forget about sitting down to dinner together – even watching a movie together is a rare and special event, given full ceremonial status by the lighting of the fire and an Indian takeaway.
Children scatter like beads of mercury into their different, socially isolated, but hopefully not sociopathic, worlds, only to emerge hours later dead-eyed, exhausted and inclined to bump into the furniture. There’s not much we can do about it. Where there are two parents working, speedy broadband, lots of gizmos and comfy armchairs, parental control has pretty much departed the premises. You don’t want to calculate just how many hours your children spend in front of a screen and you certainly wouldn’t want anyone else to know. It’d be like admitting how infrequently you have sex.
My advice to Rachida Dati? Get back to work now and take the parental leave later on, say in 16 years’ time. Okay, psychologists have convinced us that if you don’t hang out with your baby, then you could have a misfit on your hands later on, but I’m not so sure.
Babies need to be wrapped up warmly and held gently and given milk every three or four hours and frankly they can get that from someone else – whether it’s a grandparent or a trained nanny or a carer in a creche. It’s easy to find someone to cuddle and care for a cute little button of a baby, but a hulking teenager wearing a headset that allows him to join an assassination squad based in LA?
Well, there you’re on your own and that is when they could do with your time and understanding, because let’s face it, no childminder will want to coax them out of their den.
The truth is that if your teenagers are home alone, you don’t have a clue what they are up to. They’re in their own parallel, technology-driven universe which is hard to penetrate, especially by befuddled adults who haven’t worked out how to use the Skybox.
It’s not like the old days when you could delve under the mattress, unbuckle the five-year diary and break the code of the loopy handwriting to find out exactly what’s going on, then ground the little minx accordingly.
Now you would have to hire an IT specialist to do a sweep of the household system to see where their minds are travelling to.
If you can unhook them for a while, youll notice a change. At least we did when the broadband connection broke down, and we left it broken for a while so that we could actually get to talk to each other again.
Which left us with just the regular teenage problems. A teacher friend tells me that the best way to help teenagers is to keep on saying no.
No to free gaffs, no staying out until 2am, no to sleepovers, no to nightclubs in the city centre. No to watching back-to-back episodes of CSI and no to setting out for the evening with a bag full of cans.
For Dati, it’s all in the future.