Facebook is wrecking my daughter’s future

Nine o’clock on a Wednesday evening. All is suspiciously quiet in my 15-year-old daughter Laurie’s normally raucous room at the top of our house.

I want to believe that she has her face buried in Shakespeare or physics theory, but bitter experience tells me otherwise. I call up: ‘Are you revising?’

‘Yup,’ comes the monosyllabic and wholly unconvincing reply.

My youngest daughter, aged 11, who has sneaked a peek in Laurie’s room, comes downstairs and snitches by pointing to her face and miming reading a book – her big sister is deep into one of her long Facebook sessions.

With her GCSEs now just weeks away, I am getting desperate. I call Laurie downstairs, sit her down in front of her booted-up laptop and beg her to start the laborious process of disabling her Facebook account.

‘You’ll thank me for it in the long run,’ I say, sounding like the sort of parent I’d never wanted to become.

Laurie stares at the screen. Her fingers hover tentatively over the keyboard. Then slowly my beautiful, super-smart daughter turns to me, her big brown eyes simultaneously defiant and despondent. ‘Dad,’ she says. ‘I can’t do it. I just can’t.’

Of course, I could take matters into my own hands, take away her laptop and shut down our wireless connection at night (already, I have replaced Laurie’s iPhone with a more basic pay-as-you-go mobile), but I’ve always strived to trust my children, never spying on them or trying to find out what they are up to online or during time off.

That’s their business. Their social lives. And, however hard it may be, I have to hope that teenaged Laurie, in particular, knows what is and what is not appropriate behaviour – and is simply using the internet as a tool to communicate.

What really concerns me isn’t the stuff that she is posting on her ‘page’; I am not going to bang on about the danger of creepy, unwanted friends crashing in on her life, or the way that young people like Laurie so blithely and enthusiastically accept that the rest of their lives – work, play, social lives, the lot – will be spent staring at blinking computer screens.

It’s the worrying amount of time that she wiles away logged on to Facebook – and I’m consumed with the thoroughly depressing thought that she’ll be stuck with this mood-sapping habit for life – constantly checking for updates, fooled into thinking that no action, thought or opinion is considered valid unless it is ‘shared’ to a group of similarly torpor-fugged friends.

But I’m not the only one worried about the effects of all this social networking. Last month, a clinic was launched for young people suffering from technology addiction.

Dubbing those affected ‘screenagers’, the doctor leading the treatment centre said rehab services need to ‘adapt quickly’ to deal with the growing problem.

Even teen idol Miley Cyrus recently warned children to step away from their computers, saying: ‘I’m telling kids, don’t go on the internet, it’s dangerous. It’s not fun and it wastes your life.’

So, what to do with my own ‘screenager’? When her room goes silent for more than half an hour, I quietly climb the stairs and listen out for the tell-tale tappity-tap of fingers on keyboard.

When called, she’ll grunt a reply that sounds half-hearted and detached. If I venture into the room she’ll look up at me with glazed, guilt-ridden eyes.

I’m convinced that my daughter’s techno-habit has turned her from a fantastically bright, well-read and well-rounded, straight-A student at her school, with teacher- endorsed Oxbridge potential, to someone who stays up late, lies in, can’t concentrate and will probably only scrape through her impending GCSE exams.

At 15-years-old, this is probably partly down to hormonal changes; her discovery of boys, going out, fashion, shopping, dance music and other stuff I don’t even want to think about.

But it was partly our fault as well. We gave her a laptop, an iTunes account (abused to the tune of £250 in one month, now cancelled) and unlimited access to the internet, stupidly thinking that this would help her with her studies.

Discovering Laurie’s habit was so very disappointing and saddening to me because I’d always presumed that Facebook was for the thick, sad, lonely and pointlessly solipsistic – not for someone gifted with fully-formed social skills and an engaging line in face-to-face contact.

In short, I thought my daughter was far too clever for all this. I know it is an age thing, and I know as a free-wheeling adult I am more conventionally socially mobile than her, but even considering all Laurie’s arguments about ‘keeping in touch’ and finding out stuff about gigs and house parties, I just don’t understand.

Where she sees a useful communication tool, I see a scarily Orwellian, mind-numbing, childish and, eventually, utterly stupid way of passing precious time.

It would be fine if young girls like Laurie could just dip into it every couple of days or so, but for teenagers, it isn’t conducive to casual obligation.

It requires constant commitment and eats up endless amounts of time. It gets you into trouble, too.

Laurie has found out, during her endless chats, that the written word can be a very harsh, hurtfully frank and direct medium sometimes.

As for her school work? Her grades have slipped dramatically. Her end-of-term reports are replete with curt comments about lapsed concentration and a lack of application.

We get concerned calls from her school, twice a week, complaining about homework that hasn’t been handed in. Oxbridge and A-star results are no longer discussed. Just scraping through is now regarded as the only realistic target.

If I confront her, she flatly refuses to blame the internet, saying that it’s her dreamy disposition and a gnawing lack of discipline that is ruining her chances.

Will she grow out of it? Maybe. Maybe not. Facebook, you see, isn’t just a teen thing. It also offers a very sad career path for an idiot class of low-revving, slack-jawed and unemployable, middle-aged sorts.

One acquaintance of mine, one of those hopeless, life-long gap-year types, told me he likes to spend his mornings ‘doing a couple of hours on Facebook’.

Why not a walk or a bike ride? Why not actually meet someone for a proper conversation? I mean, it’s not as if he has a job or anything more pressing to do, is it?

My hope is that such nerdish idiocy will turn out to be symptomatic of a medium (i.e. the internet) that is still in its embarrassingly excitable and na’ve infancy.

In a few years’ time, we will come round to the idea that the internet is great for entertainment, shopping and work, but little else.

In the meantime, I am doing my best to wean Laurie off Facebook. When she misbehaved over the Christmas holiday, she was grounded for a month and had her iPhone and laptop confiscated.

This forced her to go cold-turkey for a four weeks, and for the first few days it was a kind of social-deprivation hell for her. She mooched around, utterly bereft; long-faced and miserable.

The eye-opener was the way that her friends immediately feared the worst, presuming that there had been a terrible accident of some sort. Then one of them had the brilliant idea of, wait for it, ‘phoning her landline’.

Laurie was actually quite impressed by the girl’s ingenuity, answering the phone as if the call had come from outer space.

Anyway, after a couple of days she resigned herself to her plight and started reading. She devoured The Great Gatsby in a day and loved it. I was so proud.

The irony of switching off her wireless capability to read the story of how one man (Gatsby) managed to engineer for himself an enviable social life and a vast party of friends without the aid of the internet will not, I hope, have been lost on her.

…and here’s what Laurie, 15, has to say

During the Christmas holidays, I was grounded. I went to a party and stayed out too late. Dad took away my iPhone and my laptop.

For someone my age, not having access to my Facebook page is like not having a phone. I wouldn’t say it was hell exactly, but I did feel completely disconnected from what was going on.

I felt I was missing out on gossip and party invitations and information about what was going on. Eventually, one of my friends realised there was something wrong and managed to locate my parents’ landline and called me on that.

Dad is always going on about how Lily Allen no longer uses Facebook and how only stupid people feel the need to ‘share’ everything, and how I should stop as well.

But disabling my account is just not an option because it has all my memories on there; my list of friends that has taken two years to build up, two years of photos, records of conversations that show how young I used to be and what I was up to at the time.

Whenever I mention this, Dad goes on about how social networking is sinister and creepy and lectures me about the way that global brands and big, bad corporations like to use it for data-mining, but I just don’t see it like that.

It is just a way of communicating and I use it, simply because absolutely everybody I know also uses it. And it is free! I sometimes upload photos from parties and concerts I go to, but the facility I use the most is the instant messaging. It’s like being on the phone to somebody. . . or sometimes five people at a time. We talk about the same stuff we would talk about in a face-to-face group, say, at a cafe or a party.

Dad worries that I befriend anyone who gets in touch with me, but actually I only talk to people from my age group, or someone with mutual friends. I would never accept an invitation from anyone much older than me.

On social networking sites, people are less shy. They get more confident and become emboldened by it and they say things that they wouldn’t normally say. Especially to boys.

I suppose you could say it is a forum for flirting, basically. This can get you into trouble, but it can also be a positive as well as a negative thing.

Despite what Dad thinks, I don’t stay on it for hours and hours. But I do go back and check it. Then check it again. And again. That’s when it becomes a bit of a problem and interrupts my homework.

I sit at my desk and try to work, but Facebook just seems to call out to me. I can’t resist it.

My friends all admit that it is a real distraction. If I am honest, I’d say that it has had a really negative effect on our performance at school.

Tags: Child internet safety, Facebook

Posted by Simon Mills on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 6:09 pm.

Filed under Parenting, Tagged as: , Child internet safety, Facebook.