I am mother of two children aged 9 and 7 and we live in a small mountain town. The eldest begins to express the desire to be able to walk home from catechism or music lessons alone (maximum distance 1.5 km, without serious problems of interference with vehicular traffic).
The father is a little worried and doesn’t trust much (he fears something might happen to him). He would feel safer if we provided the child with a videophone watch to be able to monitor it, geolocate it and to allow it to contact us if necessary.
Hence the question: in your opinion do you think this choice is appropriate or would it be better to allow our son to return home alone (maybe only sometimes, not always), without “control” devices on our part?
My fear is that then with a watch/phone he would start calling us for everything even for no reason and would not gain autonomy and responsibility.
ROBERTA
– Dear Roberta, considering that we are talking about a 9 year old child, it may be useful to equip it with a tool that makes it reachable. Could be an old-fashioned mobile phone, that is, those without the possibility of online navigation. This would result in the child finding himself equipped with a communication tool that does not integrate within it possibilities associated with the concept of navigation.
This would make him reachable and in turn make you reachable in case of need on his part. To avoid constant calls – which you seem to hypothesize is possible – it will be useful to give him this tool together with a clear set of rules that the child will have to respect and which will guarantee virtuous use of the object.
In case you notice the child’s inability to stay within the framework of rules that you have proposed to him, it will be easy to take a step back and remove the object that does not allow him to achieve the educational objectives for which you wanted to make it a resource and not a risk factor.
It will then be important, in the years to come, to know when you parents will have to discontinue the monitoring functions and control over his outgoings. Too many times, working with parents, I realize that the habit of keeping everything under control regarding their children’s outings into the world then finds them incapable of doing without it.
So it happens that a fifteen-year-old son goes out with friends and that his mother calls him every hour to find out where he is and what he is doing. Or for a parent to geolocate a high school student’s return home from school.
Last but not least: too many parents want to reach their children several times a day on school trips to find out how they are doing and if everything is going well. Are we really convinced that our children need all this protective contact? Shouldn’t we learn to discard it more and more permanently as they grow up?
A book by Alberto Pellai and Barbara Tamborini to help our children face life: “GET OUT OF THAT ROOM – How and why to bring our children back into the world”
