Joyce Fegan: David Beckham, as dad, leads by example
David Beckham, Victoria Beckham and Brooklyn Beckham. The ex-footballer says he tries to control his children's use of social media.
I got a watch this week, a Casio, €22.99. It can't monitor my heart rate and it doesn't know how many steps I've taken in a day. It also doesn't alert me to an incoming call or a message. But it does its job, it tells me the time — one of the main jobs I'd outsourced to my phone.
Smartphones are now our fifth limb. The extent to which they have infiltrated our lives is endless. They're our bank tellers, our navigation systems, our clocks, calendars, cameras and calculators, our recipe books, our shops and checkouts, our source of news, our entertainment systems, our encyclopedias, our at-home valley of the squinting out the windows as we get to observe the intimate lives of others on the various social media platforms and our communication cords for everything from message sending to social life organisation, and from family forums to neighbourhood watch groups.
Smartphones have more than endeared themselves to us. They're like the uninvited guest who's just so helpful and generous that they become part of the wallpaper — just one you didn't really choose.
This week magazine published an interview with David Beckham, a millionaire with 75m followers on Instagram. It was a PR piece about driving and cars really — he has a new partnership with Maserati. There was a curiosity-piquing line in there about how he doesn't have a driver because when he's driving he can forget he's David Beckham.
There was also a line in there about phones, parenthood, and social media — presumably it was a left-of-centre answer not meant for the interview.
When the interviewer assumed he had a team of people managing his near 100m social media following, Beckham segued into fatherhood and phones.
"I don’t put that much time into it (social media). I don’t sit there all day looking at Instagram or doom-scrolling. Because I’m also trying to control my kids as well, and their use of social media. That’s an important part of being a dad these days," he said.
In the world of parenting, phones, social media, online bullying, the sharing of intimate images, screen time and body image influences are pretty high up there among concerns
But in the world of parenting, the advice has always been that children will "do as you do, not as you say".
We can endeavour to monitor our children's phone use and screen time all we like, but how is ours?
That's why I got a watch. One swipe of the screen to see which side of midday I am and I could find myself in a non-urgent message exchange, in an utterly pointless social media scroll, or partaking in one of the 5.6 billion Google searches performed each day.
How many adults can handle a queue without the self-soothing of a scroll? Kids knock about outside a chipper as a family waits for their summer supper and the dad scrolls a screen to pass the time. How many times is this dynamic repeated throughout the day?
Young kids fling themselves around a sandpit in the middle of a playground, making friends, fully present to their senses and a parent sits on the picnic head bowed into another world.
There's distinction and discernment needed here. There are jobs to get done, shops online, people to get back to, emails to bosses to send. There used to be a time and place for that. Now everything is blended. And how often do you consciously, mindfully pick your fifth limb to send that one email or pick up that one call in the playground? The reality is more rabbit hole. One call later and we're checking sports scores, the stock exchange, latest, our crypto earnings, or losses, or we are "doom-scrolling".
Recent research from Bupa found a 247% increase in Google searches for "terrible morning anxiety". The specific search has increased considerably since the start of 2022. Some experts think "doom-scrolling" is a contributing factor.
In 2020, Oxford English Dictionary named it a word of the year.
But what is it?
Doom-scrolling in simple terms is our drive to know more, that moment when you land on an internet page and you've no idea how you got there.
Pamela Rutledge, director of the California-based Media Psychology Research Centre, says doom-scrolling “really just describes the compulsive need to try and get answers when we’re afraid”.
It's a phrase that became part of the popular vernacular during the pandemic, but it's something smartphone users have always done, and addictive, temporarily self-soothing scrolling isn't just performed over the terrain of bad news
They've nothing to compare this new normal to. But we do. We know it's not normal to consume news 24/7, that it's not normal to know what some stranger ate for breakfast and that it's not normal to have a perfectly pristine peaceful home when in the thick of parenting.
Adults are their reference point.
And younger children, the generation behind who put us all to shame with their incessant ability to be present and who have no interest in acquiring a fifth limb, what about them?
Impressionable eyes and absorbent minds take in a world where there's an interface between them and the people around them. They look up from their world of play to find grownups on screens, maybe necessarily, accidentally, or addictively, and what message are they receiving? What impact will this have on them? That exact research hasn't yet been done. But lots of other kinds of research have.
Phones and social media assist us enormously in our lives, but they also impact our mental health, our levels of empathy, our democracies, our perceptions of ourselves, our body image, and our ability to connect with others through real-life human experiences of eye contact and touch.
Before we preach to our kids about their phone use, they're just the canary in the coal mines and the customers and content providers for large billion-dollar companies, let's keep check of our own scroll and screen time.
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