I am not sure about the protocol for arguing with a royal essay, but at the possible cost of my head I will respectfully disagree with the Princess of Wales’s call for parents to ban smartphones from family mealtimes, written with Professor Robert Waldinger of Harvard Medical School.
‘Our smartphones, tablets and computers have become sources of constant distraction,’ she writes, ‘fragmenting our focus and preventing us from giving others the undivided attention that relationships require.’ She instead appeals to us to ‘look the people you care about in the eye and be fully there’.
I know what she means. She is thinking of surly teenagers scrolling through social media over dinner while their parents try to engage them in conversation. Actually, in some households it is worse than that – they don’t have family mealtimes at all, instead each helping themselves to a frozen pizza whenever they fancy. But where families are in the practice of dining together, and at a table rather than slumped in front of the TV, are smartphones really the killers of family relationships which the Princess makes them out to be?
I can think of many an occasion where families are only able to spend time together thanks to the presence of a mobile phone. If you are, say, a doctor on call, you couldn’t go out for a meal unless you have a phone with you. If you are running a business and in the midst of some challenging situation, you may need to keep in touch with your staff; the alternative to being at the family dining table might be being many miles away in an office.
It doesn’t just apply to mealtimes, either. Family walks, children’s sports matches, outings to museums – all, on occasions, can happen only thanks to being able to carry a phone in your pocket. I was much more tied to the office when my children were small than when they were teenagers because I didn’t have a mobile phone at the earlier stage.
True, a good dinner involves conversation with people who are there, around the table, rather than multiple social-media conversations with people who are elsewhere. But I can think of many a meal where a smartphone added to the quality of the conversation. The ability to look something up, to check an assertion made by someone else, is an important part of informed conversation, even over a Sunday roast. People used to be able to get away with making all kinds of claims during enlivened debate at the meal table; by the time you were able to check it against the facts it was too late – everyone had gone away.
Are smartphones really the killers of family relationships which the Princess makes them out to be?
Nor is it necessarily a bad thing if teenagers are encouraged to use social media while they are in the presence of their parents rather than doing so in the privacy of their own rooms. If a child is being bullied, or cajoled into doing something they don’t want to do, surely it is better that the family is around and able to detect that there is something wrong from their body language and facial expression.
If children are going to have to have phones at all – the Princess says she doesn’t allow her three their own smartphone, but then her eldest is only 12 – it might be wiser to restrict their screen time to when they aren’t in the presence of adults, and take the phone away and send them to read a book.
All that said, I think if I am ever lucky enough to be invited to dine at one of the royal palaces, I might just leave the phone by the door. One doesn’t want to start a scene.
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