9. THE IMAGINATION OF THE CHILD

Human beings have a conscious and unconscious brain. As the world changes day-by-day, and in the words of a modern-day sociologist, ‘the world changes every thirty seconds, more than it has changed since time began, to the present day’. That is a most profound statement to make, but as the world moves along at the pace of a jet airliner, that statement is even more true! Hardly a day goes by without a lot of TV and radio coverage of that rather overused word, Brexit, and other perhaps more important news is left by the wayside, particularly in connection to childhood!

We must strive to ensure that children are protected during their developmental years from negative experiences that may linger within their undeveloped subconscious minds and affect them negatively as adults. The child can then move towards more positive, conscious thought as adulthood looms. An eighteen-year-old doesn’t suddenly get a developed thinking as a right, or as a gift, just because in the eyes of the state they have reached adult age!

It is hard to write a blog! It is even harder to encourage people to read what one writes, but perhaps a recent experience can put things into perspective and act as a cautionary note to help parents who can disseminate what educationists write?

Three years ago, I met two professional parents, who had two teenage children. When they entered my study, I was aware that ‘I had been here before’! Both parents were wonderful, as they always are, and their first few kind words after they greeted me with a warm handshake, encouraged me to be polite in return, as I always am, but there was no handshake from the two figures standing there beside these two lovely parents, scruffy, unkempt and rather smelly, as I offered my hand to each in turn. The only words they uttered were to crave for money to buy a can, and something to eat! The parents were noticeably ashamed, but the mother reached into her handbag and extracted a crisp, ten-pound note, with which they left my study, and as they did I heard a few ‘under the breath’ expletives! Their expressions indicated that they had expected twenty pounds!

‘We really want our two teenagers to come to your school, and we have been watching your website and seeing that what you started has become very successful indeed. You have achieved your aims and it is your views on teenage morality that has brought us here’. Oh, is it?

Their son attended a grammar school and the girl a high school and had tried very hard to get their places there when they were eleven, but after a few years their education was up for review by these lovely and concerned parents. We talked for thirty minutes, after which the two ‘shadows’ returned to my study, burgers half-eaten, clutching a coffee in a plastic non-recyclable beaker, smelling of tobacco. They clutched their smartphones and sat in my study, sulking and bent-backed, asking if they could go! The boy exclaimed, “I’m not going here, it’s all coloured and classy’. It’s for posh kids!” The sister agreed and they both wanted to go home and watch a movie. It seemed as though they had been brought to meet me under duress, or perhaps had been bribed! I could smell a rat!

They all left, and later that afternoon the mother called me ever so politely and asked what it would take to get them into my school. I pointed out the terms and conditions, one of which was that they were far too young to have smartphones or access to the Internet, and a restriction on attending teenage parties in the town is part of the school’s ethos.

‘But what can I do to take these devices away from them’? Mum was definitely on my side, and so I advised her. ‘If you finance the Smartphones and pay the contract, then you own them’. I suggested she confiscate these contraptions and hide them, if she feels she cannot manage them. My flippancy was causing the father’s eyebrows to rise! He sat bemused and indicated, by the look on his face, that he wanted to leave this bastion of control! However, I should point out that my statement was something of a jest that I felt would not be taken up and was intended to make a point.

On returning home, and after the afternoon of hell with me, and when the two luvvies were fast asleep, the mother entered her children’s forbidden rooms marked ‘parents keep out’, stumbled over the burger wrappers, coke cans, other leftover food items and discarded plastic wrappers, and retrieved each Smartphone in turn. Eleven missed calls and seven messages on the screen of her daughter’s phone, and nine missed calls and seven messages on her son’s. She secreted them in the downstairs larder and despite some very nasty expletives from the two when they fell out of their beds in the morning and couldn’t find their ‘devices’, she did not give in. The two children left the house, opened the doors of their rather pretty, new Jaguar, slammed them shut and hid under their hoodies, sulking on the back seat; Smartphone-less.

On arrival at school they were met by friends at the gates and faced their almost identical questions. ‘I texted you last night, but I thought you would text back when you woke’. It was immediately clear from the gestures on their faces that their mother had confiscated them, and they all laughed. Is that a sort of bullying?

The mother drove home, called her friend and told her what I had recommended, who suggested that she did what I said as I needed to try to have a peaceful family life without the negatives that these devices brought into the home. Influenced and strongly supported by her friend, the mother drove to the local canal, parked on the bridge and got out of her car. She looked at the shallow canal, threw both Smartphones into the water, and saw them wiggle to the bottom; all white and glittering! She then drove home, rather terrified.

When she collected her two teenagers from their schools in the Jag, she received a very hostile grunt from each, and the girl threatened to move in with her friend, who had a lovely, understanding mother, and the boy had already made up his mind to leave home and wanted to be taken home to pack! The journey home was silent, and as they walked into the house expecting to find their Smartphones, when they asked their mother where they were, they were told they were in the canal! They both swore and ran to the canal and glanced into the water, to see two shimmering white objects that must be their Smartphones, neatly ‘laid to rest’ in shallow water. The girl waded in and retrieved them both and they shook them violently; but they did not work. They ran home and ran upstairs to put on the hair drier and the heating to attempt to revive these treasured possessions; their lives. Nothing worked, so they stropped, shouted and felt bereft of their best ‘friend’.

What happened next is quite bizarre. Father returned home at six, and by eight thirty they had a new Smartphone each. They were plugged in awaiting enough charge to get a signal and call their friends. Before bedtime they could engage in Facebook, send some photographs, until they were ready for bed.

What a lovely father they had, to arrive home after a long day at the surgery wanting peace, yet to treat his lovely children with the next model up!