Michael Coy
By Michael Coy
SPAIN is waking up to the true size of the mobile phone ‘problem’. The average age at which a child acquires a mobile phone is 11. Today these devices are not really telephones – they are powerful internet portals.
Statistics show that half of our kids are online for up to five hours a day. Only three out of ten youngsters say that their parents set any kind of rules regarding the internet. This has implications for society as a whole.
We need to ask ourselves – are we losing contact with our adolescents?
Here in Spain, there is currently a ‘boom’ in workshops for parents who feel they need strategies to help them cope with the internet problem.
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“The experts have taught us a lot,” says one parent, “things like how to manage our time more efficiently, and how to negotiate with a teenager.”
“FAD Juventud” is a national foundation which started in the 1980s as a government group fighting the use of illegal drugs, but which has widened its activities and now offers courses for parents, and undertakes research into teenagers and their use of mobile phones.
One parent who signed up for a FAD Juventud course is Ambrosio. He took the course last autumn. Ambrosio (who lives in Granada) felt that his relationship with his 14-year-old son had deteriorated into just a string of arguments. “I didn’t know how to handle the situation” he says. “Everything had become confrontational. His addiction to his mobile phone was affecting his school work.”
The benefit of the ‘mobile phone school’ was twofold, in Ambrosio’s opinion: “First, I learned that I’m not the only one; lots of parents are in the same situation, and are making the same mistakes as me. Second, there are ways to discuss my son’s use of the internet with him without fighting.”
One simple but effective ploy is to make Sunday a ‘family lunch’ day, eating out – but no mobile phones. Parents and children can connect and talk together in a pleasant environment for a couple of hours.
Rocío Paños is the director of “Families and Well-Being”, the branch of FAD Juventud which runs the course, ‘Digital Families: Positive Resolution of Technological Conflicts’. “Don’t be put off by the wordy title,” she laughs.
“Our workshops are simple and easy. Three sessions, each two hours long, face-to-face. One thing we challenge in the behaviour of the parents themselves is, what example are they setting their kids in their own use of mobile phones?” She points out that simple, easy rules work best – no internet after 10pm, for instance, or no use of mobiles in the bedroom or at the dinner table.
Ana Caballero counsels against handing a tablet-style screen to a toddler, to pacify the child. Ana is the vice-president of the European Association for Digital Transition. “What you are doing is, you’re using technology as a ‘dummy’, and you’re teaching that child to go to the electronic screen whenever boredom or stress arises.”
“Originally,” says Rocío García of the ‘Empantallados’ school for parents, “people came to us purely because their adolescent children were using their phones too much, but increasingly they seek our advice on cyber bullying.” Is that a thing?
It certainly is. Online bullying is a grave problem which can, in extreme cases, lead to teenage suicide. It starts when one individual is singled out and subjected to insulting messages. For the group, it seems like fun, and slurs are easy to type. The victim sees nothing but a constant stream of abuse, in black-and-white, as it were.
The perpetrators do it in a moment, and forget about it, whereas the victim reads and re-reads the insults written by ‘friends’. Adults, with experience of life, may not find abusive text messages pleasant, but can place them in context: teenagers can’t do that. Insults are devastating. And adolescents who have been subjected to this type of bullying say that the worst aspect is the strangers who join in. Random youngsters read the insults and add their own, leaving the victim feeling that the entire world hates him (or her).
Concerned parents can read more on the FAD Juventud website, at FAD.es
