I’m repeating myself here, but for good reason, yet this is not something you start to read and think “Yeah I’ve seen this type of article before”
Cast your eyes around any restaurant, bar, playground, railway station or any spot you care to name, and you’ll see the same bowed heads, the same trance-like glow: people communing with their phones.
You know this already. I appreciate that, but keep reading, because our children, God bless them, are voracious little laboratories. They absorb, metabolise, and repurpose the world with the enthusiasm of a puppy let loose in a butcher’s shop.
You and I were like that once, before spreadsheets and joint pain.
Every now and then, the devotion to cell phones becomes so complete that people walk straight into a lamppost, a wall, a car, an ornamental fountain, and even fall into an underground carpark, still clutching their screens like talismans.
Here are more examples than you need
Sometimes the consequences are not comic but tragic. A few years ago, a 15-year-old girl in Somerset was struck and killed by a train because she was looking at her phone as she crossed the tracks.
The digital age has bred a new kind of anxiety: FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out. Kids now fall asleep with their phones tucked under their pillows, hoping to wake to a flurry of text messages they might have missed while they dreamed.
Simon Sinek has been contributing to our common sense and substantiating our opinions for some years now. In 2019 he suggested that phones are marvellous at keeping us close to people far away, yet hopeless at keeping us close to the people sitting right beside us.
Set aside the next 16 minutes to benefit from his words. Don’t skip it. Open it and listen because these things are all connected.
As far as your children are concerned, you don’t want to end up muttering the parental epitaph, the saddest of footnotes: “If only I’d…”
I learned today about the frankly unnerving dangers lurking in the new breed of AI toys being cheerfully marketed to our children. Consider this a flare fired into the parental night sky: be warned. Every mother, father, and vaguely responsible grown-up should read this, particularly as the great Christmas toy-buying stampede approaches.
https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Dangerous-AI-Toys.html?soid=1136668882530&aid=-uxUZugNEPc
Graeme Dinnen
ResourcesForLife.net
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