EFFIE BATEMAN | Lifestyle | Contact
Shaking her head in disdain, Kathleen Schultz [56] informs The Advocate that she’s sick and tired of seeing exhausted young parents taking the easy option of plopping their children in front of an iPad.
Not that we asked, mind you. But after plopping down to enjoy an overpriced ham and cheese croissant in Betoota Heights Westfield food court, our reporter finds herself wrangled into a conversation she’d rather not have this early in the morning.
“You know what I find disgusting?”, Kathleen asks, delicately picking around a blueberry muffin at an annoyingly slow pace, “these parents who just plonk their children in front of screens instead of interacting with them.”
“How are these iPad babies going to learn how to communicate if they’re just shoved in front of a screen all day?”
“I think at the end of the day, it really just comes down to lazy parenting.”
Letting out a satisfied ‘hmpph’, Kathleen seems to forget that she too, was a lazy mum at times, as parents have always found some way to fob their kids off, as it’s ridiculous to assume that an adult with their own needs has the time and energy to entertain a small child for hours on end.
Before iPads, it was letting kids use the old Dell desktop to peruse Ebaumsworld and Funny Junk – and before that, it was leaving the door unlocked and letting the kids run rampant in the streets until it got dark.
Or in Kathleen’s case, not giving a fuck that her two sons spent their childhood bashing cane toads with golf clubs and setting wheelie bins on fire in the middle of the night.
But whatever, she needs to feel morally superior somehow.
“I do worry about the next generation.”
More to come.
