Unfair competition from parents

The debate has returned regarding the duty of parents to monitor the social networks their children navigate.

A complicated task, because social networks are the most unfair competitor possible in the task of educating: transgressive, addictive, empowering, a fashion prescriber, a setter of normativity in general, a vehicle for generational consciousness, and infinitely more fun than family and school.

Whoever has had children before and after the smartphone knows it: parental education has been partially replaced by that of social networks. And on top of that, we adults have also succumbed to the addiction and have not led by example. A serious mistake, because as Josep Maria Terricabras used to say, to teach means to show: “To show what is done, how things can be done, and how they can be thought and imagined”.

But educating takes time, and in adolescence, when the blood boils, it is easier to throw a stone than to offer a well-founded opinion. And we have gone from “My friends' parents do it this way” to “In France, they do it this way”.

Hypothesis: today, we parents worry more about our children's well-being than their education, exercised like that of a coach, as Salvador Cardús used to say: a coach who is not demanding will not obtain results and will not make their players progress.

Decades ago, children were subjects in a system of relationships in which parents held absolute power. Today, the parental role has been democratized, sometimes literally, and parents end up doing what they would not want to do simply because the child has asked for it.

It is clear that monitoring a child's mobile phone is the last resort. Before that, there must be hours of education by example and conversation in which parents express without fear what is right and what is wrong. Because children listen more than it seems.