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The current standoff in this household right now is about, most unexpectedly, the TV series Mad Men.
Ours is a household of much negotiation, discussion and argument about … most things, really. People make their cases, have their theses tested, are required to robustly defend their positions, then adjust according to new information, and finally come to a consensus position.
It's been this way ever since I first met my husband-to-be and his three children: I've always described the high-stakes nature of Skelton intra-family negotiations as Bosnian.
It's how I live too. But to be frank, it can get pretty exhausting.
How I long for just one, "OK, mum! Fair enough!"
Not this time. We are now in the realm of the tween — really, a full-blown adolescent, with his own ever-developing takes on the world, strong, changing opinions, individual tastes and desires.
Not surprisingly, given who's raised him, he has a big appetite for filmed entertainment — movies, TV shows, theatre and musicals are an important part of our leisure time. Now our son has emergingly strong views about what he'd like to watch. And like any young sophisticate in modern Australia, he wants to watch stuff wildly beyond his years.
And Mad Men? No, not quite yet. I'm not ready for my son to sink into that booze and sex-soaked world of bleak human frailty.
We have navigated this new path of "what to watch/what to censor/what to allow" with stumbling footsteps. I'd love to tell you we have been perfectly consistent. We have not.
This MA15+ was a no, but that one was a yes. That series is a definite no (Hannibal? Are you kidding?) but then this one has been a group yes (Better Call Saul is every bit as good as they said it was).
I have a hierarchical snobbery about books that makes me much more libertarian about literature (Cormac McCarthy books, that's a yes.) but appalled at the tradition of violent horror that's never been my thing — (Stephen King's film version of It? Hard no. I am going to need this kid to sleep at night).
So, the current tussle is about whether the award-winning 1960s social satire, Mad Men, is appropriate for a 13-year-old.
Sorry, it's not.
Russell thinks it might be OK.
Uh-oh. We don't have parental unity, and as any gimlet-eyed teen can see, that little chink of daylight between us is a wedge he can work open.
This stuff has never been easy, no matter the era, but in a time of open access platforms, individual devices and of course VPNs, there is something rather quaint about even having the discussion of what someone who is two heads taller than me is "allowed" to watch.
I know when he goes to another household he's in the culture of somebody else, more or less liberal, more or less strict. And when a young person is with their friends, Wi-Fi-connected device in hand, god knows what they can decide to watch.
Our negotiations are built on an assumption of trust and truth that a parent can only hope continues to apply outside their field of vision.
In our household I suspect we have an unusually high level of shared screen entertainment: we make plans to watch television series and movies together and will, over the course of a few months, work our way through a box set of streamed shows as a group. Yes, we will also split off into individual Nordic noir/Instagram/online Manga groups, but I am also aware of many families who watch almost nothing together.
It might help that, 70s child that I am, we only have one television.
The era of individual devices has taken us a long way down the road away from communal media consumption, shared habits and parental control. One parent's watching a sporting game, not in real time; one is scrolling; that kid's on their iPad, the other kid's on their laptop. Many little pipelines of information and entertainment pour into the house, one not touching the other, mostly unseen by others and all easily able to be obscured, its existence eventually erased.
So, our joint screen consumption has become a precious thing: something we hold onto in a time of tech-driven isolation. Which makes our negotiations even more consequential. But are they meaningful?
As the federal government's "social media ban" for young people starts to set in, it's becoming increasingly evident that a lot of kids will simply work their way around the ban, in many cases with parental help — they've become just as accustomed to the apparent free-time it gives them, too.
The infuriating aspect of the ban — which I completely support — is its belated and rather pompous context. You could read social media restrictions as a timely reminder to reset parental guidance, if it wasn't for the galling reality that this government is part of an unbroken chain of administrations that have been selling our kids to big tech for years.
For a very long time Australian governments have appeared to have little problem with what's been pumped into mini iPads. State education systems have willingly bought into big tech's insistence that school kids need to and will benefit from being taught on computers using their products (even while there is powerful evidence to the contrary).
There has been little to no oversight of what the tech giants and game developers have been pushing on young people for years, all while the likes of Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft have paid proportionately less tax than local firms.
But NOW the federal government is wagging its finger at us and reminding us to do our job and watch what our kids are watching?
When education departments abrogate their responsibility to think independently and from an evidence base about how best to educate our children, and instead take their leave from self-interested tech developers, the official admonishment to get back in the driver's seat is just a little irritating.
Parents have always found it tough to hold boundaries with teens whose job it is to push at them. They are just the roles we play right now, and I am happy to play mine. But don't ask me to send flowers of thanks to public officials who have finally decided to play theirs.
This weekend you can delve a little more into our precious and unique democracy as Annabel Crabb's Civic Duty got off to a cracking start with a hat-tip to one of my great heroes, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. You can catch up on ABC iview.
Have a safe and happy weekend, and I send you best wishes from the city that hosted that famous flat-bed truck down Swanston Street containing the greatest rock band in the world — well, one of them. AC/DC are back in town and
a whole bunch of pipers
came to welcome them.
You know how the original goes. Go well. |
