Article from The Guardian, UK (Saturday 2 November 2013)
Jamie Oliver has banned his children from social media – and in many families there is a constant battle between demands for privacy and safety. Here, parents share the lessons they have learned and the techniques they use.
You can’t blame Jamie Oliver for being worried. As the father of Poppy, 11, Daisy, 10, Petal, four, and Buddy, three, he really needs some long-term tech ground rules in his house. So he announced last week that he has banned his eldest daughters from using a mobile phone or any kind of social media. “I found out my two eldest girls had set up Instagram accounts in secret, which I wasn’t happy about and soon put a stop to,” he said. “Poppy is the only girl in her class without a mobile. It may sound harsh, but I do worry about the bullying that can go on with these sites.”
Oliver’s fears are certainly exacerbated by his celebrity status. But they are shared by many parents who, faced with mixed messages about the dangers and benefits of technology, choose simply to ban whatever they can for as long as they can. It doesn’t help that there is often a hypocritical element to all this for modern parents. Oliver announced the birth of both of his younger children to his 3.6 million Twitter followers. If we spend hours on Facebook and Pinterest – in full view of our children – how can we expect them not to go on Moshi Monsters, Club Penguin, Friv or Minecraft as soon as they can wield a mouse?
Sara Bran is from north London and writes on creativity and parenting. She has two daughters, Mia, seven, and Lily, 17. “I don’t think ‘the internet’ is taught well in school,” she said. “It is only mentioned to children in the context of safety and danger. It needs to be broken down into a) health issues – eyesight, sitting still for long periods of time, brain plasticity and creativity; b) intellectual issues about where information comes from and the ability to think independently; and c) social media and ideas about empathy, friendship, bullying, communication and relationships.”
She says that Lily worries a lot for her little sister and feels there has been a huge change in internet use and access in the last few years: “When Lily was seven, there was one central computer in our house that we all used. Now smartphones mean that all of us are in our own private worlds, having private relationships with the internet and social media. At 17, she doesn’t consider herself a digital native, but her younger sister at seven is completely immersed.”
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