‘WHEN a baby is in your tummy, is it in an egg until it’s born?”

“No, darling. It starts off as an egg, then the egg changes into an embryo when it has the right ingredient to become a baby. Then, as it grows, it becomes a foetus...”

“I know all about foetuses.”

“Oh?”

“In a game, you have to pull one out of the toilet with a toothbrush”

Cue an audible gasp, horrified questioning of my seven-year-old son and a slew of frantic messaging to my ex. It wasn’t my first digital panic, nor will it be my last. My son, for whom I’d recently bought some Story Cubes, had already somehow come face-to-face with grisly material that should have been at least a decade down the line, but hopefully never. I found myself staring headlong into the schism between my expectation of what childhood is today and the at-times unsettling reality. Our children are finding their way to material we can’t always control, even with the best of intentions. No parental locks can stop a child from hearing a YouTuber describe something inappropriate.

It wasn’t my first intersection of digital and parenting, nor will it be my last. What I’ve learned over the past few years, as my children grow and interface ever more with technology I don’t quite get, is that what matters is how you handle these things.

A few years ago I had a wake-up call; a moment I’ll always remember as the first time I felt horribly out of touch with “the kids”. I was browsing Twitter and spotted a “suggested follow” – there, looking back at me in my very adult place, was a picture of my seven-year-old (now 10) daughter’s smiling face and my grumpy old cat who’d been wrestled in for a selfie. I clicked through, utterly aghast, and spotted a lot of very innocent messages about her cat and her little brothers and Minecraft. I was confronted with the reality that my child, who I’d assumed was primarily interested in roller skates and

Zelfs, was not only aware of social media but had navigated her way through the multi-stage process of getting an email address, signing up for and verifying a social media platform.

After the initial internal meltdown, I realised that how this was handled would set the tone for all future tricky interactions around childhood and contraband. Sometimes it’s bloody hard – it takes lot of willpower to counteract the sort of instantaneous ban-all-the-things reaction. As parents, we’re programmed to protect but we don’t know exactly what we need to protect them from or how to do it. Despite liking to think of myself as a tech-savvy, liberal parent, emotion overwrote common sense and there it was – parental panic. Just like the every other generation before me who’d experienced a national angst over youth culture we don’t quite get – comic books, rock and roll, television, Gameboys, the internet – digital childhood is our current moral anxiety.

A few years ago, George Mobiot wrote a terrific piece of catastrophic scaremongering on how children are losing their connection to nature because of their screen time, and at that point I bought into it. Just today, in the same publication, I read Rob Walker’s “Fears grow for children addicted to online games” and I’m less convinced. There have been hundreds of articles between then and now that speak to this technology-parenting anxiety – most often they’re overwhelmingly alarmist and fail to offer any real solution to quell the growing nervousness. They all tell iterations of the same basic horror story: the new thing must be feared.

Too often our critiques of digital childhoods rely on the specious. They hark back to an overly romanticised boys’ derring-do version of childhood that frankly doesn’t and never has existed – unless you’re a character in an Enid Blyton novel.

They also fail to take into account that we’ve all lived through our parents' panics and for the most part we’re functioning adults because we have grown up and grown out of our obsessions. I’m one of the first generation of adults who leapt headlong across the digital divide in the late 90s, who glutted herself on as much shiny new internet as my developing brain could handle, and I’m fine, arguably. And I’m not the exception. I look around myself, at my peers, who have degrees, jobs and spouses and all the other things they’re expected to have. We haven’t lost our social skills. We haven’t all become recluses. We’ve matured and moved on – there’s no reason to believe our children won’t do the same.

Yes, I’m sad that the AA Milne compendium my children were gifted lies untouched. I feel a little bruised that the Kindle Fire I filled with 100 childhood classics for my daughter has never been used for reading. But if I take my children outside, they can still spot a starling or an elderberry bush and will jump at the chance to climb a tree. The pixels will always lose their appeal for a day or even just a minute, and in those moments our children will be reminded of what’s waiting for them outside, because it’s an unwavering constant. I’ve never seen a child yet who isn’t wowed by a rainbow or full moon or who doesn’t wish for snow when winter comes. We should take heart in that.


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