Parenting can be a gruelling and soul-sapping ordeal at times. Sure, there are those joyous moments when your little treasures take their first teetering steps across the living room floor, but let’s be frank: the everyday kid-wrangling is at times a right royal pain in the arse. If you have never approached the late afternoon school run with a dark sense of foreboding, at least once, you’re a filthy, stinking liar and you should probably have your younglings confiscated.
For most parents, especially those who don’t have traditional jobs to go to, our main connection to the outside world is the smartphone. A pocket-sized universe of wonder, the phone is a source of information, enlightenment and, if you’re a hardcore Twitter user, the continual screech of highly charged rage aimed in every direction imaginable, punctuated only by quirky animal pics.
But it seems that our schools are not content with ordering our offspring around all day long, and are now trying to bring the parents into line as well.
The headteacher at St Joseph’s RC primary in Middlesbrough has whacked up a bunch of shrill advisory signs around the school’s entrances that read “Greet your child with a smile, not a mobile”, featuring a crossed-out figure with a mobile pressed against their ear, housed in a red circle. The red circle, of course, being the internationally recognised symbol for, “Oi – pack it in!”
Liz King, the head in question, said: “We are always looking at ways to engage parents and we’ve got the signs at each entrance and at the foundation entrance. They are simple, but they carry a really important message. We are trying to develop our speaking and listening in school and we thought it was a really simple way to get the message across.”
Well, speaking as a parent who regards his smartphone as his significant other, this smacks of borderline fascism. For crying out loud, let us enjoy our final few moments of huffing on the cyber-crackpipe that is the internet before we scoop up our offspring and resume our role as their downtrodden slaves and/or unpaid entertainment officers right through until bedtime.
Once they’ve been released from the captivity of the classroom, they are ours and ours alone – we have to deal with their unreasonable demands, their unconscionable culinary whims, their inherent weirdness (never dwell too much on the fact that you’ve got tiny humans running around your house), and their farting. Cut us a bit of slack if we try to hang on to every last second of contact with a more rational world.
Anyway, there are all manner of legitimate reasons for us to gawp at our phone’s screen as we amble into the playground – and avoiding making contact with other parents is right at the top of the list.
We live in divisive times, and last year’s Brexit result has torn society asunder. I live in an area that voted 60% leave, so I can’t be expected to just wade into a conversation with a stranger whose only connection to me is the fact that we both procreated at the same time almost a decade ago.
A casual remark about the onset of spring is realistically only two short conversational steps away from turning into a heated debate about the return of blue passports or why Nigel Farage has been robbed of the knighthood that should rightly be his.
It’s all far too loaded with potential mayhem. Do you really want me to stop looking at my phone while I wait for my kids to be let out of class, or would you prefer to see me growling, grinding my teeth and pushing a Ukip voter into the ornamental pond that year two built last autumn?
We’re not supposed to be entwined with our kids at all times. I recall once reading about tribes of hunter/gatherers where children are carried nonstop for the first few years of their lives. Attachment parenting, they call it. Out and out insanity, more like.
It’s 2017, and most parents have a similar attachment relationship – but with their phones. Everyone needs an outlet to help them cope with life’s innumerable pressures, and for a lot of parents it’s fannying about on our phones. Hell, if we thought we’d get away with it the vast majority of us would turn up glassy-eyed and reeking of stale liquor.
I have to go now. The school run beckons. Then I need to air-fry some chicken dippers while scrolling back through the tweets I missed while I was writing this.
