The Ignore No More app is wrong because parenting should be about trust
How much freedom is too much freedom? It’s a question that parents have, I suspect, always asked themselves. Just how far shall we let our children stray from the familial cave? I read recently that some tribal cultures regard children to be self-sufficient from the age of six, meaning that, from that age, they can be left alone in the wild and possibly not die (clearly I have been encountering an altogether different calibre of six-year-old).
But, while prehistoric communities had woolly mammoths to contend with, modern parents are facing the much more present dangers of traffic, knife-wielding gangs, and paedophiles. Judging by the number of tabloid-sponsored secret camera experiments to which we’re being exposed (in which a “stranger” offers children sweeties in the hope that they’ll come away from the playground; spoiler alert – the kid always goes), it’s a wonder that the nation’s parents don’t keep their children locked up in a cupboard, sustaining them by sporadically sliding wafer-thin slices of turkey ham and torn-out pages from the Argos catalogue under the door.
When you have a child, my mother once told me, you become forever vulnerable. Perhaps “frustrated-mother-turned-evil-genius” Sharon Standifird was feeling particularly vulnerable when she hit on the idea for her app Ignore No More, which makes it impossible for children to ignore parental calls by locking their smartphones until they get in contact. I wouldn’t blame her if so: it’s a scary world out there.
Technology now enables parents to be in touch with their children more than ever before. I was 13 when I got my first mobile phone, bought for me because of the solo, hour-long commute I was taking to school. I had been given the paedophile talk at a young age. (“Don’t talk to any strange men … if someone asks you to go and look at some puppies in the back of his van, say no … when I leave you in a locked car with your brother outside Safeway in Caernarfon for five minutes, don’t take him to the toilet. I will think you’ve been kidnapped and start crying by the magazines.”) I assume parents are still going in for this sort of chat, but I do wonder if the ability of being able to reach your progeny at all hours of the day and night might be replacing the good old-fashioned tactics of trust and respect, especially when it comes to teenagers.
Growing up in a rural area, I was afforded quite a lot of freedom. As a child this meant roaming for miles and engaging in activities the health and safety implications of which my mother would certainly not have approved, sailing from a clifftop using a bent bit of metal piping and a rope as a makeshift zipwire springs to mind. As a teenager, this mostly meant getting stoned in other people’s barns. My non-helicopter parents weren’t always certain where I was, but the nature of the negotiation was thus: we’ll let you get on with it, but you phone if you’re in trouble, and we always need to know what time you’re coming home. In other words, they trusted me, and I respected them.
An absence of this is the main problem with the Ignore No More app. If your child is ignoring your calls, you’re probably phoning too often, and if you’re phoning too often, it’s probably because you’re worried. But you needn’t be worried if you’ve set ground rules, and one of those rules is that making your parents so anxious that they fear for your life is not a nice feeling. Another is that sometimes, your children aren’t going to want to hear from you.
Having a phone on you can sometimes make you feel invulnerable, but, ultimately, being safety conscious is much more important – technology shouldn’t make us complacent. As a generally anxious person, I do worry that something bad has happened to my family with alarming regularity. The instinct is to call for reassurance, and when that call goes unanswered, it can send you into a tailspin of worst-case scenarios.
Something I am trying to learn is that you have to allow yourself to worry – because isn’t that what loving another person is about? I’d urge parents not to install Ignore No More for this reason. As for its possible usages with regards to romantic partners who don’t seem to be returning your advances – I’ll allow you to make that call.
culled from guardian.co.uk