INGRID DOULTON | Lady Writer | Contact
With youth crime one the rise right across the country, middle class Australian families are not taking any risks when it comes to the possibility of their kids suddenly joining a gang in the 15-30 minutes that might get left to their own devices while commuting to and from school.
Or worse yet, they could become victims of youth crime, while seated at the notorious bus stops or train stations with thirty other schoolmates at 3pm in the afternoon.
Even in the age of CCTV and increased Stranger Danger awareness, there are still precautions that parents need to take to ensure their teenagers are contactable for every minute of the day.
Teaching them how to use a payphone, or identify responsible adults that may be able to help them is not enough. Teenagers need to have the exact same access to smartphone technology has the generations before them.
This includes access to encrypted messaging services, unregulated social media platforms, and highly addictive video games, streamed directly via 5G towers and public transport wifi routers.
Once upon a time the only teenagers with this kind of unsupervised access to a smartphone were those that were being used as a pawn in a custody battle between petty parents attempting to out-cool each other.
But times have changed, it’s now very much the mainstream standard for every child to maintain unmitigated media consumption and constant connectivity to the vastness of the worldwide web at all times, and parents who don’t adhere to this new model of parenting can look forward to the nightmare of filing a missing person report – or bailing their kids out of jail.
The idea of screentime being treated as a reward for good behaviour, in the same way Australian families treated video game consoles and evening TV in years gone by, is outdated an unsafe.
Constant access to the internet and everything on it should be afforded to young people at all times – that’s if you actually care about your child.
Some parents might try and moderate their child’s screen-time with wifi passwords and parental controls. However, this is usually a pointless exercise, given the fact that young people are always ten steps ahead in their abilities to bypass any technological hurdle that exists between them and the safety that can only be provided to them by the internet and social media.
While this kind of connectivity and screentime does come with the risk of teenagers being so distracted that they actually miss their bus home, or crash their bicycle, at least you can go about your day knowing that they can call if you if they ever end up in a scenario that only their parents can resolve while on the other side of town in the middle of a workday.
