Kerre Woodham: Are parents restricting their kids' online access?

The Government is doing its bit to protect children from themselves by banning the use of smartphones during the school day and by moving to bring in legislation restricting social media use for children under 16. The schools are doing their bit, although it's more mopping up than prevention, by bringing in counsellors to help children, some as young as eight, who've been exposed to extreme online content. 

The question is what are parents doing to protect their own children? Teachers talk about hearing students discussing their gaming exploits late into the night and doom scrolling TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram, repeating objectionable things they've heard online that they don't really understand. 

I'm not in the position of having to deal with young ones and smartphones, not in terms of setting the rules. The young ones in my house, the just-turned-nine year old and seven year old, love using my phone to look at videos or to add music to their playlists on Spotify, so I've put controls on the phone, but then we couldn't get some of Eminem's stuff, so we had to go for the radio edit version of Eminem. And that's fine, we work around that, but I have put controls on the phone just in case. It's not them looking for it, it's the accidental discovery of things that you cannot unsee. But I don't have to set the rules around how many hours they can have and when they can view it – that's for their parents to do. 

But surely, and that's the way it works in our house, you set limits on what the kids can access, how much time they have to access it, when they can access it, and if they break those rules, their rights are rescinded. That hasn't happened yet, but they're not old enough I suppose to go looking for trouble. But surely that's the way it works. It always has worked. You set the rules and if the children break the rules, then there are consequences for that. Or has parenting suddenly been turned on its head since the year 2020? 

Why on earth should schools have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on counsellors to mitigate the harm children have exposed themselves to outside of school hours when they're supposed to be under parental supervision? One parent talked about getting up to go to the loo in the middle of the night and seeing the light behind the closed bedroom door – their daughter was on the phone at 1am. That's not the school's problem if she has access to material she finds harmful or if she's been exposed to material that's disturbed her. 

When you're looking at the amount of money that schools say they're having to spend because the kids are so upset and beside themselves, surely that money could be better spent on activities or resources for the school that all children could enjoy, rather than have it spent on a small number of traumatised late night scrollers.  

I'd really love to know what the rules are, what rules you've set. According to the Greens, it's pointless putting any kind of restrictions on children and social media use. Pointless having legislation around it because the kids will just get around any restrictions placed on them by the government. But as a parent, can you say that you have put protections in place that work, that you have got rules in place for your house that work, or has the whole concept of parenting as I understood it completely and utterly changed, that there are no rules and there are no consequences? 

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