Mango Pulp

Is my phone turning my brain to pulp? And/or is it great that my teens have phones?

Like everyone else, I’m trying to reduce my phone addiction - or rather my compulsion to check things that don’t need to be checked on my phone - whilst simultaneously trying to manage the phone use of my kids. Nothing lays bare our hypocrisy like telling a thirteen year old to get off his phone while we are looking at our phones. I wonder if one of the reasons people like the idea of a social media ban for teenagers is that it will stop having to negotiate this particular dilemma.

We got a smartphone for our eldest son when he was (maybe) ten because there were terrorist threats to locations in London which were on his route between home and school, and we didn’t always know where he was for his long journeys home. We can track him through it and this remains really important. Not least when he’s on his way to hospital in an ambulance and we’re not with him which is a terrible situation to be in, but at least we can see he’s getting closer to us.

Meanwhile I have been trying to regain my focus in various ways. I physically separate myself from my phone by leaving it in the house when I work in my garden shed. I have to send a message to my husband James first to check he’s available to answer calls, which adds admin tasks to an already annoying process. I sometimes put my phone on Do Not Disturb so I’m not drawn in by notifications. Radically, I also try to just not look at it for a while, trusting that I must have some degree of self-control. When me and James went for a walk last week, I only looked at my phone briefly to check there was nothing urgent. I missed a call telling me that my son was being taken to a hospital in an ambulance. He was okay - the emergency had passed. The paramedic put her phone next to his ear so he could hear my voice, and a teaching assistant who knows him really well was with him all the time. But how I’m meant to detach myself from my phone if I’m worrying that I’m missing that call?

I read something this week about a tech CEO who has got rid of his phone entirely - too distracting, now he only spends an hour a week on email, don’t let the tech rule us! That reminds me of those ridiculous day-in-a-life things where men get up before dawn to work out and spend more time meditating than they do with their kids. Presumably the tech entrepreneur has a wife who will answer a call from the school, his assistant will find him when there’s an emergency, and someone else is topping up the ParentPay balance when it’s running perilously low.

Max is thirteen and has a smartphone too, which meant we could message him when we were at the hospital so he knew why we weren’t at home. His school sends us emails telling us about the dangers of smartphones but I can’t tell how much they talk to the pupils about it. They have a policy for year 7 and 8s of locking up their phones, but not year 9s, and do things like tell Max that he must remember to go this lunchtime meeting, that he should put it in his school google calendar, but no pupils can check their online calendars during the day.

It seems to me that we can’t decide what we want from teenagers - we want them to be analogue for some things, but digital for others, and are wildly inconsistent between the two. Give them every single piece of homework online, but then tell them off for their screentime. Tell them they’re in danger of being radicalised while we’re way worse than them at spotting AI videos. Tell teens off for being too loud and lairy in public but then tell them they shouldn’t be at home on screens.

Of course I worry about Max’s screentime because I don’t know how much is reasonable and it’s almost impossible to work out the real dangers of Snapchat because no one my age uses it. Can’t wait to find out in ten years how, exactly, we are fucking it up.

One of the things Max shows me on Snapchat are the videos of this guy who makes desserts with funny, dead pan voiceovers. Max suggested we make his Mango Ice Cream cake, and I was onboard before I realised that by ‘we’ he meant me, and that the recipe required cooking over two days. But because I love Max and I love cakes, and a great advantage of a thirteen year old is that you can send them to the shop to buy mango pulp, I made the social media cake (and the ice cream) and half-heartedly decorated it without one of those spinny things that the internet tells me I need. We ate it with my sister, in real life, and everyone was very impressed with my delicious chiffon sponges.

Mango Ice Cream Cake recipe