Opinion
Why I’d rather my kids smoked ciggies than used a smartphone
Michelle Cazzulino
WriterOne of the many (many, many) downsides of life in the digital age is the amount of horsepower being generated online by parents working assiduously towards obtaining a master’s degree in Haranguing People About All The Things They’re Doing Better Than You.
I’m sure it was always thus, although at least during the internet-free 1980s you got a consolation instant coffee at playgroup when someone rolled in wearing a pristine white dress and spent the next half-hour extolling the virtues of Fab and giving your filthy urchin-kids the side-eye.
Mind that flaming sambuca, but at least there’s a pathway back to sobriety. If your child’s “drug of choice” involves a smartphone, good luck with that. Credit: iStock/Marija Ercejovac
You know what the other excellent thing about the 1980s was? No smartphones. No endless doom loops featuring children who, having recently mastered the use of their opposable thumbs, immediately began campaigning to deploy them on an iPhone of their very own, despite a wealth of evidence suggesting their time would be equally well spent standing in traffic and playing a spirited game of chicken with the nearest bus.
No one’s interested in watching a victory lap completed by someone who’s still in the trenches. In that spirit, let me say this: judging your decisions, or anyone else’s, requires a level of emotional investment that I am woefully incapable of. If this was a battlefield and the parenting police were closing in on you, I’d be sitting in the middle, doing the cryptic crossword and speculating to myself about the answer to 28 down.
However, in a hypothetical scenario where I was forced to choose between handing my 12-year-old his own smartphone, or watching him down a shot of flaming Sambuca, I would unhesitatingly opt for the latter. Furthermore, I would gladly ignite it myself, before offering him a chaser of Winfield Blues and a lighter.
I’m not sure when I traversed the godless terrain between having an embarrassing parent and being an embarrassing parent, but it’s done. And my kids can actually contact me in an emergency, although they would probably attempt to negotiate with an advancing axe murderer rather than risk social suicide by pulling out the world’s most old-school dumb phone.
What I would really like to do now is drown out the noise surrounding Other People’s Kids’ iPhones. The next set of parents who come to my house claiming the only reason little Johnny has a smartphone is that they’ve just finished upgrading their device, rendering the old phone obsolete and therefore ripe for handing down, will find themselves hog-tied to one of my dining chairs and forced to read a curated collection of posts from my kids’ class WhatsApp groups. Spoiler alert: the athletics carnival is next week, and everyone is confused about how to register for the 800m.
As ever, I arrived at my extremist position on smartphones for the under-18 set by deploying a potent mix of contrarianism and unvarnished self-interest. In another life, I would’ve made an excellent Third World despot.
I nonetheless reckon I’m onto something. Forget horror movies involving body snatchers targeting children; my personal worst-case parenting scenario involves YouTube videos featuring kids unboxing rubbish, anything at all produced by Mr Beast, and most especially, those strobe-lit seizures masquerading as expert gaming commentary, posted by someone’s jobless, unmodulated, unmedicated 19-year-old.
Then there’s the unholy trinity of TikTok, Insta and Snapchat. I’d rather strap my kids to a rotating propeller hovering precariously above a crack team of specialist man-eating piranhas than throw them, unsupervised, into those scream chambers of misery and self-loathing.
You don’t have to go far to find excellent, well-researched, scientifically robust essays outlining the arguments for keeping kids off smartphones. The one by Jonathan Haidt in this month’s copy of The Atlantic is a cracker. I wouldn’t even attempt to summarise it, other than to say that if – god forbid – my 12-year-old developed a taste for Winnie Blues and Sambuca, there’s a well-lit pathway back to sobriety. But dealing with a 14-year-old whose drug of choice is kiss emojis and Insta hearts? Good luck with that.
I once posited to someone my long-held theory that we will look back on these times of unfettered smartphone access for kids and shudder. Furthermore, I added from atop my soapbox, we will regard them in the same way as we do those old movies where a hapless patient receives the news of terminal lung cancer through a cloud of cigarette smoke being belched out by the doctor himself.
In hindsight, deploying this argument to a tech professional was one of my more idiotic manoeuvres. After he’d finished laughing me out of my own living room, he pulled out his smartphone to show me some study highlighting the virtues of social media. Fortunately, I was able to divert him with Kim Kardashian’s latest butt shots and a selection of lovingly compiled cat videos. Keep calm and carry a smartphone, as they don’t say in the classics, but only after you’re old enough to vote.
Michelle Cazzulino is a Sydney writer.
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