It does not matter if you are at the end of school, in the park, on vacation at the breakfast buffet or at the table waiting to eat. Fathers and mothers live glued to the mobile. We criticize (and rightly so) the abuse that adolescents make of the ‘smarthone’, but we do not realize that they do what they have seen, for years, in us: have the telephone as an extension of our hands.
Eight out of ten parents recognize that they are aware of their devices when they are doing something with their children, according to a recent survey of bbk family carried out among 600 families from Euskadi with children of 6 to 12 years. Extrapolated to the rest of Spain, the study deserves reflection. And a performance.
BBK Family has organized the campaign ‘Aita (dad in Basque), are you there?’ to raise awareness among fathers and mothers, who will meet on May 14 in the Doña Casilda park (Bilbao) with the aim of playing with their offspring. No cell phones involved. And who says play, says talk. Or just watch. Be attentive to them. A while.
In the Education and Upbringing Club we have already talked many times about how to remove the mobile from the parents, not from the children. Is living glued to the screen while our children play on their own in a park an innocent gesture without consequences? No. When children become teenagers, with what authority are we going to tell them not to spend all day looking at a screen? Let us remember that the main educational organ is not the ear but the eye.
I am not in favor of one motherhood so dedicated that you only live for your son and nothing else attracts your attention. We are not saying that we have to stay by his side and play with them all the time. The English hideout bores me supremely. Not to mention the summer rackets on the beach. Or petanque. But it would be nice to find a middle ground. And what would be even better is being able to find time to talk with our children, without screens in between and looking into each other’s eyes. So that? So that they can tell us about their school battles, for example. To tell us how they feel. And so that we also make some confession to them. It would be nice to find the way to know how to speak so that your children listen to you and, above all, how to listen so that your children speak to you. The phrase is not mine, it is the title of a book, a true parenting classic, written by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazzlish.
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Let’s not demonize mobile. We could not live without it, it is a fact. But keep it in your bag for a while when you’re with your child. “Your son doesn’t need a super dad or a super mom. He needs you. He needs your presence and your commitment. An authentic, flawed and fully present father and mother. You don’t have to be perfect. You can not. It is enough that you are there for your children. Love them”. Tyna Pyne, child psychotherapist and co-author of ‘The power of presence’ (Alba), tells us, a scientific essay on the importance of the presence of their parents for children’s development, something so fundamental that it even determines that our children do well in life.
“Being present and in tune with our children requires our attention, don’t steal it. When you are with them and you need to use a device, be it the mobile, computer or tablet, tell them why you’re doing it. Tell them you need to look up an address or call a person. In any case, when our children are around, try to leave the screen and pay attention to them & rdquor ;, concludes the disseminator. Shall we try to do it this weekend?