Devices are a curse! I love and hate my tablet all at the
same time!
Our house is device filled and school holidays often result
in an overuse of them by all of us. The older children have ipads and I have a
tablet and a laptop.
My youngest, who is nearly 4 and naturally wants to do everything
the rest of us do, now frequently asks to borrow my tablet and if the rest of
us are using ours, I have no right to say no really.
Don’t get me wrong, I'm not anti device for him. He rarely
watches tv and so his screen use is in the form of educational games and you
tube videos about trains! Both of which have taught him a huge amount about
letters, sounds and numbers. He could tell me more about trains, tracks and
models than I have ever known in my whole lifetime and he’s adamant he wants to
be a train builder when he’s grown up (this seems to flit between being a model
train builder and a real train builder!)
However, despite this, I still have a constant battle with
myself as to whether their usage (or should I say OUR usage) is excessive or
not.
Ok, so back to what I was saying about me and my sleepless
nights (I do have a habit of going off on a tangent – forgive me!) You know how
it is, when things that feel ok in the day time feel like the worst things in
the world during the small hours. This
is what keeps happening to me. In the day, we do our “thing”, we go out
together, the children play together, I look forward to July when we will kiss
goodbye to the school system once and for all and we can enjoy learning and
being together. Then at 10pm when I’m thinking I should be heading off to bed I
decided to take my tablet to bed with me just so I can check that educational
website I heard about the other day. Or while I’m there I’ll just plan a quick
timetable of what our days will look like (seeing as it’s only April and I’m
thinking ahead to September it’s really not something that needs to be done
NOW!). Oh and then I’ll decide to start looking up interesting documentaries on
You Tube that we can all watch to start off a topic of some sort!
(Incidentally, I found one that I think my 11yr old will like – not watched it
all the way through yet so you might want to check it first but it’s here:
So, there I carry on… watching, reading, researching,
planning… until I realise it’s 1am and I’ still not asleep! But not only that,
but I'm not even tired any more! My brain is whizzing with the “what ifs”. What
if I fail them? What if they’re all together far too much and they end up
hating each other? What if I don’t push them enough socially? (I'm incredibly
shy sometimes and am totally out of my comfort zone in a group situation). What
if they struggle to make friends because of this? And a million other “what if’s”
that float around my head at 1 am!
So I lie in bed thinking of all of these things until it’s
closer to 3 am when I finally drift off to sleep. At 7am when my son wakes me I
feel like I've been out on a wild night out, dancing until dawn. I groan and
roll over and hope he goes somewhere else to play for a while. But having been
a parent to a young child for the past 13 years, I've learnt by now that that
is highly unlikely. So I haul myself out of bed, bleary eyed, to go downstairs
to make myself a very strong much needed coffee.
While I drink said coffee, I sit
and ponder about the “what if’s” I had the night before. I tell myself that I won’t
fail them. They are in charge of their own destiny, so if they want something
enough I will make sure I help them to achieve it. They will be together all of
the time but this will only make their relationships stronger. I have already
seen T’s (13) and F’s (3) relationship blossom and me and T are now closer than
ever before. I’ll make sure I encourage time apart through socialising with
their own respective friends, working privately if they need their own space
and having time just to myself and one of them at the weekends when G is home.
I think they’ll be OK socially.
We’re all sociable in our own ways. This may not be in a large social group as
such but we all like to get involved in group “lessons” as well as socialising
with people daily on a more one-to-one basis. We already see people daily
either as informal meets with friends or organised dance and gym classes and
have plans for more things in the future. So in the light of day, my worries
and “what ifs” don’t feel so worrying after all.
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