Two hours and twenty-one minutes. That is the average amount of time I spent on my phone a day in the last week, which sounds bad – but at least it’s down by 7 per cent on the week before.
The Children’s Commissioner for England would probably have something to say about my mobile attachment. Writing in The Sunday Times last weekend, Dame Rachel de Souza suggested that parents should do more to protect their children from inappropriate content online, in part by being better at knowing what it is our kids are actually seeing on their varied devices.
But de Souza also suggested that adults need to set a better example by checking their own habits. As she put it, parents remain oblivious to their children’s online activity in part because “we are ourselves dopamine-addicted, stuck in a cycle of scrolling”.
I certainly recognise the challenge. And I regularly feel I have failed as a parent when I realise how much time my children – especially my son – spend on their internet-enabled devices. A recent YouGov survey found that nearly a quarter of kids are online for more than four hours a day, and that almost 70 per cent are on their screens for at least two hours daily. My son is definitely in that latter group. And there are some days when four hours would feel like a parenting win.
I try to discourage these excesses, mostly by indulging his passion for playing or watching sport. But I can’t do that all the time, and it can be a case of the pot calling the kettle black when I look up from my phone to tell my child to turn off his tablet.
And yet I wonder whether it is entirely realistic to think that parents can change their own habits at the drop of a hat when the modern world is essentially a digital one.
When I stop to look at what exactly I am doing on my phone, it’s true to say that some of the activity is fairly inane. I scroll X much less than I did when it was Twitter, but I still check the app several times a day. Mostly, however, I do so to find out what is going on in the world. It goes with the territory of working in the news business, but I also consider it to be a useful – important even – part of responsible, adult life.
square WILL GORE
My parental pride is off the Scoville scale after my son's spicy showdown
Read MoreEven if I were to agree that news consumption is optional, there are plenty of other things I do on my phone which are unavoidable elements of life’s proper administration. Last week, for instance, I had to arrange a remortgaging of our house, which I was able to do online. I also had to pay some bills and change a direct debit – all doable at the click of a few iPhone buttons.
What’s more, in order to ensure my son can get off his screen and get onto a cricket field, I had to pay his annual club fees (via their website), get involved in his squad’s new WhatsApp group and register him with an app run by the England and Wales Cricket Board. I also had to pop onto Amazon to buy him a new bag for his kit.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the kitchen table, my wife was dealing with the arrangements for an upcoming birthday party (WhatsApp again), topping up the kids’ online school meal accounts and liaising with a music teacher via text message about some Duke of Edinburgh Award forms that needed signing for our daughter.
If the children accuse us of double standards, then they might have a point. But we cannot simply avoid these digital chores. And really, are we any less present when tapping away at a screen than our own parents were when they were filing in paper forms, or on the phone to the bank, or fulfilling their daily appointment with the television news?
In some ways, the digital revolution has made it much easier for children and adults to identify with each other’s ways of life: we are all online out of both necessity and choice.
The key, as de Souza also noted at the weekend, is to be transparent about what we are doing and to ensure our children can be equally open about what they are up to.
Communicating in person about the lives we’re living online is the best way to avoid misunderstandings and to keep our kids safe – and perhaps even to help me reduce my daily screen time to less than two hours and 21 minutes.
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