So, my reputation as a Parenting Expert is growing and I have received an email from a confused parent looking for some advice. What tha?
My response was, in a nutshell, "Have you met me?"
Now, we all know that I'm just plain lucky the Tsunamis appear to be nourished, unbroken and, well, alive... so Dave and I decided that the best approach would be to harness the collective parenting might of the Maxabella lovelies instead. And, naturally, I get to put in my own two cents as well.
See, Dave's eight year old son wants a Facebook account. His friend has one so he wants one. He already likes playing Farmville on his Mum's account (so that's who's out there throwing pigs at each other). His Mum is happy for her son to have a Facebook account of his own, provided that it is heavily sanctioned and monitored. Dave's concern is that starting the boy up when he is too young risks exposing him to to cyber-bulling and adult content that might kill his interest in social networking forever.
My two cents is that if you have to heavily sanitise or monitor a product before giving it to your kids, the product is too old for your kids. Full stop. Why start them up so young on a product that was obviously made for an older audience (and admits that's the case by requiring that you have to be older than 13 to use it).
And Dave, it starts with Facebook at eight and then where does it go?
Over the course of three generations, 'being a child' has been squeezed down by canny marketers from being 0 - 18 (up to the 1950s) to being 0 - 12 (up to 1952 when Bill Haley and those busy American marketers invented the concept of the 'teenager') to being 0 - 7 (in the nineties when the 'tweenager' came along). There's not a lot of time allocated to just being young anymore; not involved in or even knowing about what 'society' even is. And I stress that during that time of rapid social change, it has been no secret that physically, emotionally and mentally our children have struggled to keep up with the marketers*. Keeping up with this 'society' we've created is literally killing our kids.
We know all of this as parents, yet we continue to allow our children to do things to 'keep up' with the other kids. Big corporations who want to sell our kids stuff are pretty much deciding what the rules of 'up' are and 'other parents let their kids follow those rules, so it must be okay.' But while we're freely handing over the responsibility of raising our children to 'other parents', they are ironically thinking they are handing over the responsibility to us. The net result is that the peer group is raising itself, following rules made up by some company wanting to make a profit out of them, while we foolishly judge the success of our parenting on whether our children are an accepted part of this ungodly mess. Like deers caught in headlights, what a trap we have found ourselves in.
Because, oh, we know that there are worse things than not fitting in. There are worse things than not keeping up with a society gone mad.
This debate has, of course, been going on for generations and each generation has upped the ante on their parents. And as much as we remember the manipulative techniques we used to pull on our own parents, we remember even more strongly that desperate longing to fit in when we were kids / teens / tweens ourselves. The outcome is that more than ever, our generation has a struggle on our hands to resist the 'but she's doing it' pleas and just say no to our kids. It's unbelievably hard because our immediate reaction is that our child will be lonely and bereft if we don't let them do what everyone else is doing.
But what if everyone else decided that enough was enough as well? What if we all got together at our individual schools and agreed an array of things that we promised we won't allow our children to do? A formal manifesto that we promise we will do everything we can to abide by. A difficult manifesto to agree on, of course, but if we could manage it, wouldn't it take away a little bit of the steering power of the peer group and those marketers... just a little?**
While I genuinely think that most of our children are going to grow up just fine despite what our superficial, materialistic, sexualised, celebrity-obsessed society is doing to them, more and more of them won't. We need to use our brains, not our hearts on this one. Think beyond the immediate gratification of our darling children and look at what's on the road ahead. Because right now it looks to me that there's a massive pile of deranged bullshit on the road ahead and we're all in danger of hurtling right into it.
What do you think about Dave's dilemma? Is an eight year old too young?
Would you create an agreement with parents on some values you'd all agree to for your group of kids?
* This is just one article siting the damage that our society it doing to our kids. There are so many out there, it's frightening.
** I made this up, but I'm liking this idea more and more. If you agree that it's got legs, I'll expand on it and get something together that we can work on as a group. I would then be more than happy to be 'Patient X' and try out our manifesto on the P&C at my children's school... please let me know what you think of the idea.
