There is plenty said about the time children spend on electronic gadgets, but what about parents’ constant use of technology?
‘NO PHONES for Mum! No computer for Mum! Noooo cakes!” is scrawled in red marker across three weeks of the calendar which hangs in Patricia O’Flaherty’s kitchen.
It is a message from her eldest daughter, Katie (10), who is clearly looking forward to plenty of undivided attention from her mother during their summer holiday in France.
“It’s sad really,” says O’Flaherty, a cake designer who juggles her home-based business in Carrigaline, Co Cork, with rearing four children ranging in age from 10 years to 10 months.
“I had no idea how much of an impact it had on her.”
She started A Touch of Magic in September 2002 because she wanted to be a stay-at-home mother. But she finds the children resent the time she has to spend on the phone and the computer responding to customers – more so than when she is baking.
Katie and her sisters Lucy (seven) and Sophie (three) like to help out but O’Flaherty leaves the wedding cakes and icing to night-time and very early morning when they are in bed.
“Ironically the whole point of doing this from home was so I was in a position to choose my hours.” The problem is that customers expect her to be at the end of a phone or responding to e-mails.
Communications technology can be a double-edged sword for parents, whether they are trying to run a home-based business or trying to stay on top of an office job. Mobile phones and computers enable them to spend more time with their children; the downside is that they are constant distractions from family life.
There are the dads who read and send texts at the dinner table; the mums browsing the internet during homework time; the dads on their iPhones in the park who are oblivious to the “look at me” shout as their child hangs upside down on the climbing frame; the mums who cut short bedtime reading as they really do need to check their e-mails.
This 24/7 technology is compulsive and solitary – and children immediately sense the “barrier” when their parents are using it.
There is plenty of research and comment about the time children spend on electronic gadgets and how this affects their communication with parents. But what does parents’ constant use of technology do to children?
It is a question which the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Initiative on Technology and Self is trying to answer. After five years and 300 interviews, its director, Sherry Turkle, has found that feelings of hurt, jealousy and competition are widespread among children, according to a recent report in the New York Times, headlined "The risks of parenting while plugged in".
“Over and over, kids raised the same three examples of feeling hurt and not wanting to show it when their mom or dad would be on their devices instead of paying attention to them: at meals, during pickup after either school or an extracurricular activity, and during sports events,” Turkle was quoted as saying.
While she acknowledged the pressure adults felt to be constantly available for work, she added that she believed there was a greater force compelling them to keep checking the screen. “There’s something that’s so engrossing about the kind of interactions people do with screens that they wall out the world.”
If done in the company of children, there is little chance of the responsive parenting – interaction through playing, talking and answering questions – that is so important for early childhood learning.
A parent not appearing to be giving attention to a child is definitely a problem, says Dublin consultant psychologist Owen Connolly.
“Children don’t believe you are listening until you give them eye contact. An adult will say they can hear, even if they’re looking somewhere else. But children don’t believe it, unless you are making some sort of eye contact and even feeding back what they have said.”
If children do not think a parent is listening, they will start misbehaving to get negative attention. In the cases of some children referred to his clinic in Stillorgan, they have identified the problem as not the child but the parent not paying attention, with the child interpreting the relationship as being one in which the parents are more interested in the television, football, the computer or whatever else they like doing.
It can be a big help if a parent is aware that a child, particularly a child under 10, needs you to feed back to them what they have said as confirmation that you have actually heard them, Connolly advises.
“Just take a moment to turn away from your computer, listen to what the child is saying, say back what the child has just said to you – not your interpretation but what they have just said. That invests in them a sense that you are actually listening to them.”
This “talking back” technique, used even over a short period, is the most effective way to establish in children’s minds that mum and dad do listen, he adds.
Tammy Darcy is a mother of three who runs an online business from home in Passage East, Co Waterford; she also blogs and is completing a thesis. “It’s a lot of face time with my PC,” she says and her children do complain about it.
She was a little shaken recently when her middle child, five-year-old Freya, presented her with a drawing she had done of her. “I thought it was a book in front of me but she said ‘it’s your ’puter’. That threw me a bit but at least she was drawing pictures of me and not my childminder!”
Up to two years ago, Darcy worked full-time outside the home but last February, after a year’s research, she started theclothesline.ie, a website through which customers can swap maternity, baby and children’s clothes. She works on a laptop, so she can follow Freya and her brothers Seán (11) and Zach (two) around the house or outside to the garden.
“I think no matter what we do, we are always going to feel guilty.” Anyway, she points out, there is no mother at home who can give her children full attention.
Kirstie Affleck wonders where this whole idea of having to spend “quality” time with your children came from. She says she struggles to balance working from home on her online baby shop, littleacorns.ie, with the care of her three children, Megan (nine), Freya (four) and seven-month-old Cheyenne.
Living in Co Wexford, Affleck started with a more specialised online business, “Babyslings and Outdoor Things”, and then opened the Little Acorns shop in Gorey. She has since closed that outlet to concentrate on selling online.
“We have a better life with me at home – even though I will be ‘not present’ sometimes. Definitely there but not present with them.”
However, 50 years ago mothers had to clean the house and children were out playing, she points out. “Your mother would be there but not necessarily any more present. Maybe it’s because children aren’t out so much that makes a difference.”
She knows that when she starts getting irritable with the children while she is on the computer it is time to switch off – “probably should have switched off before that and then I wouldn’t have got irritable”.
As soon as she goes on the computer it’s “Mummy can I have a drink”, or some other request. “They will do that with anything, it’s not just the computer, but also the housework, the gardening – although they can get involved in those,” she concedes. The technology is “very much one-to-one: me and the computer; me and the iPhone”.
Both she and Darcy talk about trying to control their compulsion to check e-mails. Affleck has found that her recent purchase of an iPhone has helped to ease e-mail anxiety. For a start, it is quicker than having to wait for the computer to warm up. Also she can just glance at the e-mail and resolve to deal with it later.
“It takes away that compulsion – which has to be a good thing. I am not out and about with the kids and thinking ‘oh, I have got to go home and check my e-mails’. I don’t think they notice it so much either because it’s so quick – at least I hope not.”
Up to recently, Darcy would leave the computer on all day and find it hard to resist the call of the “bing” if an e-mail came in. But then she started turning it off at lunchtime and from three o’clock to do the homework and make the dinner.
“It doesn’t go back on until the kids are in bed. But up to that point I’m a lunatic – it is a compulsion which I can’t understand and I can’t get over.” She too is buying an iPhone, which will mean she can keep an eye on e-mails while on holiday in Lanzarote.
Affleck tries to keep her children away from the technology and encourages arts and crafts instead. The eldest, Megan, does not have any electronic device nor is she allowed to use her mother’s work computer or iPhone.
“I know how addictive it is. I have this love-hate relationship with the internet myself. I absolutely love it but know I spend too much time on it – but then I’m working!
“I feel I am a bit of a hypocrite not letting them on the phone or the computer when I am on it so much,” she adds, “but I think I am doing the right thing.”
O’Flaherty too is looking at ways of balancing family life with keeping customers happy and this means she has to turn away business.
“I am trying, trying, trying,” she trills rapidly down the phone, “to slow down. I tend to do the phone calls now when they are in school and any missed calls or missed e-mails I will do in the evening time when I play tag with my husband.”
She saw how much the children, particularly Katie, enjoyed the extended maternity she took after the arrival of baby Darragh. Now in the afternoon she locks her office, which keeps her at least physically away from the e-mails, if not mentally.
“At the back of my head I’m thinking ‘oh I bet I have more e-mails coming in’ while I’m saying ‘that’s a lovely picture you’ve drawn’!”
swayman@irishtimes.com
IF PARENTS CAN'T SIT STILL, THEY CAN HARDLY COMPLAIN ABOUT JITTERY CHILDREN
A friend was going through the photos she took of her children during a recent holiday abroad and she noticed that whenever her husband appeared in the background, he was on his iPhone.
“In every single one! He held it down here,” she indicates waist level, “hoping he would not be noticed so much.” He may have taken a week off but he still felt the need to keep an eye on what was going on at work.
People like him would feel stressed on holiday if they didn’t have the technology to enable them to stay in touch, says Karen Belshaw, a stress expert with the VHI. “I find that it is more what people don’t have or don’t know is stressing them.” Whether you are an actor or a financial controller, being out of the loop, missing a gig or missing a call is what worries people.
Have you noticed that when people find themselves sitting alone in a public place now, almost invariably the phone comes out? “It is amazing how people can’t sit and observe anymore,” she says. “It is very much habit and a security blanket.”
There is a lesson in self-control here. “Stress is caused by sensing a lack of control; it is also caused by being too controlling,” Belshaw says.
Should parents be putting aside the phone and laptop when they go on holiday? “Every parent needs to work out what works for them. For example, some parents bring the iPhone to a restaurant, give it to the child to play with and say ‘it’s great, we get to have a conversation’.”
Generally, she says, it is less stressful for people if they know they have the facility to stay in touch, but they should take time off from the phone and computer for periods during the holiday. It’s all about balance, she points out, and being aware that children learn from us what’s acceptable (and talking on the phone through dinner isn’t).
If parents can’t sit still and do nothing, they can hardly complain about jittery children. “It is really important to teach them calmness and ways of relaxation,” Belshaw adds. “If you find yourself sitting for 10 minutes with nothing to do – just enjoy the nothing to do.”
