A Different View with Dave O’Connell

IF Santa brings your nine-year-old a mobile phone this weekend and you’re left to wonder what has become of the world you grew up in, where sometimes even an entire family didn’t have a phone – and if they did it was stuck to a wall – then wonder no more…you’ve just become the rule rather than the exception.

Because more than half of Ireland’s nine-year-olds now have a mobile phone – up ten per cent to 54 per cent in just a decade.

It’s not so long ago that a child thought a mobile was a thing hanging over the cot, but these days they obviously need to keep in touch with the international money markets and monitor their bitcoin portfolio – hence the need to be able to make calls on the go, between practising joined-up writing and learning their multiplication tables.

It was the ESRI who revealed the level of mobile phone ownership among children recently, by disseminating data from the ‘Growing Up in Ireland’ study, which compared nine-year-olds in 2007/8 and 2017/18, a period of considerable social and policy change.

It doesn’t address just why a nine-year-old actually needs a phone – although it would be fair to assume it’s more for social media than ringing relatives – but in many ways, it’s just another symbol of changing times.

Mobile phones, and tablets generally, allow both children and adults to spend more time in isolation – playing games online or communicating with pals without speaking a word – but there’s also a downside to this.

The same survey finds that eating together as a family, for example, is in decline – down over the decade from 72 per cent to 67 per cent.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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