Discussion · Government Orders
Will Greaves Liberal
“Parents feel pressure when other kids get phones, and they have to monitor what their kids do online. It is easier for families when schools or governments set shared rules. That way, individual parents do not have to make unpopular choices alone. I want the member to agree with that.”
“Madam Speaker, I have a pretween daughter, and there is a very real conversation that happens in our school, with the parents in our school community, about who is going to give their child a cell phone first because when that one parent gives that one tween-age child a phone, it creates the desire for this object among all of the other students and puts incredible pressure on us parents, so much so that we wish the school would simply ban the use of these devices so that individual parents would not have either the burden of monitoring their child’s social media and Internet use or the social pressure to keep up with the Joneses and the latest technology, etc. I wonder if the hon. member for King—Vaughan would agree, as a mother and a grandmother, as she said, that some of these decisions are actually made easier for parents and for families when they are taken at the collective level. When a school or an institution such as government makes an evidence-based, rational decision, that makes a standard common to everybody and relieves parents of the individual responsibility of having to make that unpopular decision that their son or daughter cannot have a phone.”
Madam Speaker, I have a pretween daughter, and there is a very real conversation that happens in our school, with the parents in our school community, about who is going to give their child a cell phone first because when that one parent gives that one tween-age child a phone, it creates the desire for this object among all of the other students and puts incredible pressure on us parents, so much so that we wish the school would simply ban the use of these devices so that individual parents would not have either the burden of monitoring their child’s social media and Internet use or the social pressure to keep up with the Joneses and the latest technology, etc. I wonder if the hon. member for King—Vaughan would agree, as a mother and a grandmother, as she said, that some of these decisions are actually made easier for parents and for families when they are taken at the collective level. When a school or an institution such as government makes an evidence-based, rational decision, that makes a standard common to everybody and relieves parents of the individual responsibility of having to make that unpopular decision that their son or daughter cannot have a phone.