VINTAGE PARENTING

Camilla Hill - 28 May 14

Our children have never had it so good. If you were born in the twenty first century you will have never known life without the internet, you will have a mobile phone before you are ten and you will already have access to a tablet device.

Children can speak to granny in Australia for free, youtube provides hours of free entertainment as well a fantastic visual way to learn and we no longer need to dig out the Encyclopaedia Britannica as reams of relevant information is available in seconds via Google. We are at the heart of a major revolution in communication, learning and progress and this is just the start.

But we know all this and yet middle class parents seem appalled by new technology, seeing it as an evil force that will turn their children’s brains into mush and stop them from developing normal social skills. Like the generation of parents that banned Elvis Presley for being too sexy, we are starting to sound like a bunch of out of touch fogeys who are pointing the bony finger of blame at a technology we don’t understand, for a generation we can’t control.

Worse than that, we all seem intent to replace the gap created by our technology boycott by an absurd obsession with everything old; dressing our children in vintage 70s clothes and making them play with beautifully crafted but boring wooden toys. We don’t want better for our children; we want them to have the same crap their grandparents had “back in the day.”

This is not a legacy bestowed upon us by our own parents. They embraced the new wave of gimmicks and gizmos that were appearing in the shops in the late 70s and 80s. As children we had a wealth of new cool things like Care Bears, Pogo balls, Wuzzles and armbands. We had ET and Alf and Big Bird. What little girl doesn’t want to a own a small pastel coloured pony with a brushable mane and tail? There were sticker book crazes and happy meal toys and it was all new and shiny and great.

But now we want our kids to play with well crafted German wooden toys made by Brio and expect them to wear towelling short shorts from Jules Oliver’s latest 70s range. We take all the photos of their childhood on our iPhones with crisp high definition and then Instagram the fuck out of them in the hope that they will look like a washed out, forgotten Polaroid from 1979.

Why bother giving our kids a boring old ipad when we can give them something vintage and wooden and REAL, like a…. stick?

All we seem to want for our children is to recreate the long hot summer of 1984 with endless picnics and cartwheels across sun dappled fields in Dash track suits devouring home made fish paste sandwiches and choc-ices from Bejam’s.

We’re always so keen to brag with friends about how we were ‘always outside’ when we were kids, riding our bikes and making camps… BUT what we don’t mention is the Saturday mornings spent glued to Going Live, or afternoons in front of Pat Sharp’s Fun House and Neighbours. Let’s not pretend that we weren’t addicted to TV as kids, or that we didn’t spend hours playing Tetris.

Are we so enchanted by the romance of childhoods of yesteryear that we are letting our children miss out? Parents are proud to say their kids have never been on the iPad or that they don’t have toys with batteries. When they get to school they will be learning simple programming and using these technologies every day. To not let them get a little bit of practice and exposure now is tantamount to sending them to school with a stone tablet and chisel in their backpacks.

I’m not saying for a second we should let children stare into the abyss of a screen, playing the latest cbeebies app for eight hours a day watching their immature brains melt and ooze out of their ears with Postman Pat’s Special Delivery Service theme tune being that last thing they ever hear before we mop them up from the floor and pour them back into the cyber sphere. I’m not advocating texting each other when one person is upstairs to come down for dinner because you can’t face lifting yourself off the sofa, walking upstairs and talking face to face to your teenage children. Obviously, there are limits.

But let’s be realistic. The internet is amazing and a darn sight more exciting than a yo-yo or a cup and ball. Our children are immersed in it and we should be embracing it for their sakes.

I have an inkling the worst culprits of vintage parenting, are the very same parents who are constantly glancing down at their own phones. You know the ones I’m talking about – who can’t do a single session at soft play without Tweeting, Whatsapping and emailing everyone under the sun.

Their children recognise them across the playground as the ones with their heads bowed over the iPhone, squinting in the sunlight at the screen to find out the latest football score. They can’t go round the supermarket without updating their Facebook status and taking an instagrammed photo of some vintage looking packaging in Waitrose.

At least I know that while I’m glued to my own phone as I push my children to the playground in their 1970s rainbow outfits, my kids are also face down, fully addicted to their iPad, which seems only fair.

Camilla Hill

Camilla works in the marketing team at Disney and blogs at Word to your Mummy. She is mother to Luca, 3 and Ivy, 1. Camilla lives in London.

View profile for posts, events and more info