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FOR MANY PARENTS, an all-out ban on tech seems pointless. We all know that prohibition seldom works; worse than that, it often creates a forbidden allure around the banned object.
Anyway, technology is incredibly useful in our lives. We enjoy it for entertainment purposes, we use it for work, and it provides many of us with opportunity for social context, so it feels narrow-minded to try to force children to live without tech.
How I work
I’m an integrative psychotherapist and I work with a wide range of people who present with many different types of problems. I often get referrals from GPs but most of my client base comes from readers of my books.
I see teenagers and adults but I don’t see younger children – instead, I work with the parents of children under 12 and collaborate with them to help their child.
Yet, in my work as a psychotherapist, I can’t help but notice how much our devices have become a poisoned chalice in our lives. On the one hand, they are great fun and often fascinating, but on the other hand, they can be a continuous distraction from our real lives and can often make us feel tense, nervy and disconnected.
Some children manage technology in their lives very well but there seems to be a certain type of person who is more susceptible to becoming fixated with their devices than others.
This child is often very focused and oblivious to their surroundings while using the device, but then, when it is taken away, their all-consuming rage can be shocking.
How it begins
The companies that are making eye-watering profits from technology that targets children are focused upon keeping the children on their screens for as long as possible.
They begin the process by enticing children and parents in with advertisements about how educational and creative the technology is. Many parents are impressed with these promises and don’t want their children to grow up without knowledge of tech.
Sadly, it doesn’t take long for the so-called creative and educational programmes and games to be swapped for mindless rubbish.
Girls and the hunt for ‘likes’
Through the work I do, I have found that the focus on the visuals from apps such as Snapchat and TikTok seems to have fostered a type of vanity and narcissism in young girls.
It often starts playfully with funny faces, bunny ears and sparkles coming out of the hair but ultimately, for many children, these funny images soon lead to a series of selfies and an over-the-top fixation with their appearance.
Teenagers attempt to reach out to their ‘tribe’ by presenting their image to peers for approval and validation. Every new place or event attended bring photo opportunities.
Nights out socialising with friends turn into extended photoshoots that show how much fun they are. Unfortunately, what I find is that a young girl’s friends can generally be more focused upon their own self-image and so can, therefore, be fickle in their approval. That constant seeking of approval is a pinch point for young girls.
‘Likes’ don’t tend to lead to any sense of inner satisfaction – rather they often trigger an anxious need to continuously check and recheck our media.
Stressful for parents
Many parents are just like me and were raised back in an era when few among us had any confidence in our looks. Consequently, when our children show such pride in their appearance, parents often feel a mixture of pleasure, disbelief and fascination that our children are so incredibly pleased with their own self-image.
Sadly, I meet far too many teenagers in my work who initially present as very self-satisfied, sophisticated and confident but then over time, it emerges that they feel shattered inside.
Although their outer veneer is impressive, inside they are like frightened rabbits; always afraid that they will be found wanting; intensely fearful that everyone will turn on them and often just waiting for the rug to be pulled from under them.
And they’re probably right to be so worried – it’s not just high-profile people who fall victim to vicious pile-ons; online bullying is rampant on social media.
For boys, it’s video games
Although loneliness, vanity and anxiety are common features for many teenagers who overuse social media, a whole other wide range of problems can also present due to overuse of video games.
Many of the boys I work with have become fully absorbed in their online lives to the detriment of their real lives. These children prefer to live online – they are funnier online, their mates are more interesting when they’re online; life is just better when they’re online.
Some children fall into overuse of video games between the ages of 10 and 15. Life can be complicated and playing video games is a really good way to forget about the messy difficulties of life.
Teenagers who become over-focused on video games can lose interest in their hobbies, in school and in their peers.
Problems often arise when these teenagers try to re-engage in their lives and find that they haven’t learnt the necessary social skills to help them along the way.
We need to talk about pornography
Over-use of pornography is another increasingly common issue among teenage boys I work with. While they may consider themselves to be sexual connoisseurs online, these children have often never even kissed a girl in real life.
Indeed, they often prefer to remain strictly platonic with the real-life girls in their lives and keep their sexual side for the privacy of their own bedrooms – the messy business of flirting and being vulnerable to rejection is just too scary.
It is, perhaps, arguable that maybe they are right – might this be a healthier way to handle a sex-drive that far exceeds their maturity? Yet the loss of romance amongst their peers and the loneliness of this decision leaves these teenagers living in a hyper-sexualised world, causing them to often withdraw from real-life relationships.
If a child is spending all their time on devices and is disconnected from their friends, then it can be difficult for them to sustain meaningful friendships. We can’t really get to know someone who is always semi-distracted by some game or who is always online and presenting the most polished and perfected version of themselves.
It is only when we authentically turn up in our relationships that people can get to know us. Technology offers us fabulous opportunities, but we need real-life friends and we need a real-life – because no matter how interesting life is online, it is only in the deeper connections that we feel truly alive.
Consuming technology all day every day is bad for our health and so we should teach our children to make a decision to ‘go online’ and to ‘go off-line’. Being semi-online all day every day is mentally draining. Here are some tips for parents:
Create tech-free rooms in your house
The kitchen and bedrooms are good places to start. This means that if you are in the kitchen and your phone pings, you leave the kitchen in order to read the message. People nowadays go outside to have a cigarette, in a similar way, we need to acknowledge that reading our phones while in the company of others is inappropriate and remove ourselves when necessary.
Set aside tech-free times in the house
Many parents find that turning off the WiFi between 10 pm and 9 am is an effective way to keep some sort of control over our children’s technology habits. Children who have free reign over their tech in their bedrooms late into the night can often be witness to the weirder and darker side of the internet. Not only that, but lack of sleep is a serious issue for our era and good sleep hygiene entails keeping control of our tech use at night.
Establish some parental controls over the devices in the household
There are many different ways for parents to gain control over their children’s devices. Some parents swear by Net Nanny, others by iKydz and other apps, but too many parents dread the couple of hours it takes to install these controls and so they never quite find the time to get around it. Do your kids a favour today – begin the tedious but very worthwhile process of installing parental controls on all the children’s devices in your house.
Asses your own social etiquette regarding technology
Many of us inwardly wince at our inability to control our own use of technology as we are prey to a multi-billion Euro industry that has successfully wrapped us around its little fingers. Begin to learn some appropriate social etiquette concerning your own use so that your children can know how to make sure that technology remains a good servant instead of a bad master.
Stella O Malley is a psychotherapist and an author. Her first book ‘Cotton Wool Kids’ was published in 2015, ‘Bully-Proof Kids’ was released in 2017 and her latest book ‘Fragile: why we’re feeling more anxious, stressed and overwhelmed’ was released last year. She hosts a podcast for parents called Secrets of the Motherworld.
Euro has been an unmitigated disaster .
Certainly from wee Paddy’s perspective, bailing out this disaster .
@Willy Malone: Are you even old enough to remember the punt and what the economy was before the bubble? Newsflash! For almost all the time we had our own currency the country was in recession or close to bankrupt.
@8bitplebian: totally agree with you there.in fact can’t see why there can’t be a single world currency.it might cut out all this fluctuation and maybe even some of the corruption.Le Pen fluffed her chances when she misused European Parliament funds.
@Bennythekid: We had big self inflicted recessions in the 30s and 80s. The first was long before the concept of the EU. You can destroy an economy with (Greece) or without (Venezuela) a currency union.
@8bitplebian:
So we needed the Euro to bail us out, and in turn we end up bailing it out, bit of a disaster all round.
@8bitplebian: interest rates were also insane back when we had to punt, 18 percent in early eighties. 12 percent in early 90s. Yep, Things were far from better!
It’s funny that people pay no attention to what previously happened in this country.
We also bailed out banks back then too, AIB was bailed out back in the days of the punt.
@8bitplebian: Not quite as black or white. Ireland’s celtic tiger began in the mid 90s when we still had the punt, 2000-2001 were great, once the Euro came into effect in 2002 it kept going, but the economy was already performing well. The unemployment and economics of the past were die to failed policies. It was the change to corporate tax and economic measures from the 90s that gave us a boom and a recession. The Euro just made it more difficult to come out of that recession. Look at Iceland, no Euro, hot rock bottom in 2008 and they are on the top of the world now and has been for a while already.
@Juan Venegas: Couple of points there. The “real” boom appears to have lasted for no more than a few years at best from around 97 to 2001 with the rest being property inspired madness. I’d be hesitant to call that as having anything to do with currency. Also the comparison to Iceland is not a fair one. It has the population of Limerick county and could make a nice enough living just selling fish to the rest of the world.
@8bitplebian: Or old enough to remember the Pound?
Let’s hope Le Pen wins outright
It will be the best thing for France
@Gary Purcell: yeah, nothing like starting a economic war to make things better for everyone.
@Gary Purcell: A brainless populist thug, clearly melting under any form of adult scrutiny.
@Diarmuid:
Coming from you that’s a bit rich, wasn’t it you who hoped the EU would give the UK ‘a good hiding’ over Brexit? What did you mean exactly? An invasion? Sanctions? Punishing the voters for actually voting and winning, is a bit sick.
Cue all the comments about how terrible the euro is followed by the usual verbiage about printing our own currency again. Countries like Ireland who grossly mismanage and inflate their economies as in the early 2000′s will eventually experience a crash, irrespective of them being constrained by the rules of a single currency union or not.
@8bitplebian: There’s some truth in that, but being in a single currency removes much of the ability to do the management necessary. FF made an unholy mess of the public finances, but there was very little they could do to prevent the mad accumulation of private debt that was fuelled by the euro.
@Ben McArthur: I think that’s an unknown. When FF faced down the economic crisis in the 80s (created in part by their own 1977 budget) the approach they took made the situation progressively worse even with all the tools they had available. We also had very high inflation and a currency devaluation to worry about. So there’s no reason to think the 2008 crash would have been handled any better.
@8bitplebian:
Correct me if I misunderstand your position but your arguing that our politicians are inept whether in the Euro or not, so its better to stay in it?
@Maurice Bourke: No, more that blaming the single currency for the 2008 crash and subsequent recession is inaccurate. Economic mismanagement can happen with or without the euro. If Ireland had properly regulated its banks and controlled the property bubble, the impact of the then financial crisis would have been much less severe.
Le Pen is as damaged as her father -
The thing about Le Pen is she could win if she pledged a tough crackdown on non-EU migration, while maintaining the status quo economically and pledging to keep the euro.
If she just stuck to that issue, she would win.
@Fred Jensen: Le Pen might not even get to the 2nd round and there are absolutely no poll results that even suggest that she will win.
@Neil Mcdonough:
I know. I’m saying she is shooting herself in the foot with her anti-euro rhetoric. Peoples savings would be wiped out. She should just stick purely to the non-EU migration issue if she wants to win.
@Fred Jensen: I don’t understand her point about the Euro. Some countries might do well to leave it, Greece for example ( mainly because they should have never adopted it in the first place ) but there is no way it would benefit France in any way anymore.
That was by far not the moment of that debate. Macron is the worst that could happen to France,worst than le pen.that guy agree with everyone and can never answer a question. The best moments of the debate came when the so called “petit candidates “started speaking specially Mr asselinaud. Mr poutou or Miss arthaud. Macron telling people that Tx to European Union we were not killing each other what a joke that guy is.
@Frantz Harband: “Macron is the worst that could happen to France …” Most people agree, yet the media always give him as favourite. Hmmm…
@Neil Mcdonough: Like Simon Coveney, he is backed by the bilderburgers
Ireland cannot be trusted to manage its own independent currency. Look at what Charlie Haughey did when Ireland did a devaluation. he passed insider information to his cronies so that they could enrich themselves.
It would be better, in light of the credit bubble from 2002 to 2007, had Ireland not joined the euro because it facilitated a massive credit expansion for non economically productive borrowing but exiting the euro would now be be very damaging.
Public goverance and economic management in Ireland are very lacking. The Punch and Judy of FG andf FF does not help. It is a Lanigan’s Ball.
@Neil Mcdonough: Like Simon Coveney, he has the same bilderburgh backing
Macron or Le Pen?
Pragmatists will prefer Macron.
Ideologues with far right sympathies, Brexit types, will prefer Le Pen.
At least there is a choice but with choice comes adult responsibility.
@Tony Daly: Listened to the entire debate and some of the commentry this morning. Le Pen has her support but did herself no favours trying to convince anyone else last night. Macron, the candidate of the media did no better. The surprising thing is the media constantly make him favourite yet no-one I know, both from the left and right, can stand him. He’s seen as being more liberal than Fillon, thatcherite even, but mostly an empty vessel who tries to please everyone.
Melenchon maybe but unlikely, and no-one should write off Fillon yet. If it wasn’t for his affairs with the law, he would stand head and shoulders above the rest in terms of stature and experience. Going to be an interesting few weeks!
@Neil Mcdonough: all the French people I know will happily vote Macron.
@David Fülöp: Interesting. That would have been true also a while back for some of my acquaintances, but not anymore. Sound more and more like Vallsozy everyday.
@David Fülöp: your friends are blind . that guy is a joke. He will the continuation of what’s happening for the last 15 years in France.
I never liked when we switched from the punt to the euro. I found I could get very little with the euro. With the old currency you could get a litre of milk for a pound/punt. With the euro, out can but a bag of chrisps with a euro and then, that’s it. It’s gone. There was no value in the euro. The euro only benefitted those who dealt with mainland Europe often like for holidays or work.
So I was never a fan of the euro. However we are stuck with it. I don’t like it when I read comments about ditching the euro and going back to the old currency. A new currency will be worthless for a long time and imports into the country would be very expensive and we rely a lot on imports.
Debates will mean very little. Le Pen hasn’t got a hope. Even if she gets through the first round, she’ll get utterly demolished in the 2nd round of voting.
Another one with lots of rhetoric and no plan just like the brexiteers. Easy to knock something down very difficult to put in a credible alternative. But no one looks at that.
When Ireland had the punt it was like living in Mexico, there was always the risk of devaluation and currency shocks.
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