Life is also what happens from the time the children tell you “mom, dad, put down the mobile phone” until you tell them. The rite of passage to high school – some start it at the age of 11 – is one of the popular moments to give them the keys to their own digital playground. They would not be premature: almost half of the children between 8 and 11 years old in Barcelona have a mobile phone, according to a survey carried out by the City Council last year.
The mobile phone contract between parents and children is a formula that has been going viral on networks for years because it generates a lot of conversation and, moreover, is very polarized. These are more or less friendly rules to delimit timetables, tolls and the possibilities of the world that opens up in your hands when you have a mobile with an internet connection. The format that Fernando de la Rosa (@tinonet) tweeted last Monday contains no less than 28 (!) rules for his 12-year-old son.
“It’s a remix of some previous works like @FundacionANAR with its recognized contract. In my case I have modified many points and removed the formality of the contract”, he explains in a thread with more than 700,000 impressions. It includes points relating to privacy (“Parents or legal guardians are responsible before the law for how you use it, therefore, we must have access to your passwords”) and the use made by the child (“ You can’t download anything without asking us first”) but also what parents do (“If you think we don’t follow the rules, you tell us. Our example is the best way to teach you use these devices”).
In addition to jokes in case there was no way to shorten the 28 rules, in the answers there are those who believe that later things are never as one imagines (“I come from the future. It is not fulfilled”) or that this it must be stopped from the beginning (“The best rule is to give none”). There is also some reflection on starting to look at ourselves, the adults, and the use and abuse we make of them. That in the end the thing about Cortázar and the watch happens to us and we are the ones gifted: “Think about it: when they give you a watch, they give you a little flowery hell, a chain of roses, an air dungeon”. Most of us, with hours of free time spent scrolling every day, we wouldn’t pass the filter of the child’s manual when he’s still a child and tells you: “Put the cell phone down already”.