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DIGITAL AGE PARENTING
Femi Adekunle on Parenting
I say it often and often, parents must upgrade.
Imagine (yes, just imagine it) that your 15-year-old daughter is on her gadget whilst you are sitting by her side. She does not get nervous to hide her conversation from you and she continues to chat with her friend. That alone gives you comfort. As the curious mum or dad that you are, you snoop on her chat and all you can see are: 8, 9, 143, 420, 1174 etc. “Aawwwn, my diligent baby girl”, you silently heave a sigh of relief and conclude she is discussing her math lesson with her friend. Unknown to you, she is speaking in codes. In their coded thesaurus, 8 stands for ‘oral sex’, 9 for ‘parent is watching’, 143 for ‘I love you’, 420 for ‘marijuana’, 1174 for ‘nude club’, etc etc. The lexicon is endless.
As parents, my wife and I always held the opinion that we would not buy smartphones for our kids until they entered the university. Now, this was a personal decision. As I always posit, every man or woman is the number one parenting expert in their home and over their children, meaning, you know what is best for your kids and my style may not necessarily fit into your home. Withholding smartphones from them was our own template and it worked for us. However, when the Covid-19 lockdown came in 2020 and schools had to engage them online, we discovered that they had elaborate access to the internet. This made me realise that, just as they are so fast to integrate with technology, we have to learn to integrate too.
Besides exposure to negative values as a result of uncensored interaction with the internet, such as the above, there are so many harmful, destructive effects on our children. Research has shown that over-exposure to digital content leads to physical and social maladies like laziness, obesity and even depression. Juvenile suicide is also traceable in part to this contemporary debility. I will possibly write on tips for dealing with the challenges of digital age parenting, soon.