Recently my 14year old daughter tried to guilt me into buying her extra phone credit. This is a copy and paste of what was actually said.

You wanna know what iv been missing out on a lot of shit for year you basically nwver send ms cridet anymore I have to go to my friends to actually talk to my friends because I never get cridet anymore and it you say that you send me cridet all the time its a lie I missout hanging with my friends cause I cant call them anymore to ask to hamg out 😐😐😐😑😑😑😑


Oh dear

My old man had 3 words for those situations: Get a job. (Mine was mowing lawns in our street.)

But face to face meetings in 2019? Imagine that!

I guess it is a sign of the times and a lot of parents use their kids' attraction to gadgets as a way of getting them to stop nagging about things.

As per GTC, and no doubt yourself, I thought nothing of getting on my bike and just 'disappearing' for the day. Usually that meant just heading to a mate's place for the day. I had to be home about half an hour before tea and had to keep 10c in my wallet for using a public phone in an emergency. Randomly, my mother would inspect my wallet to make sure that 'bob' was still there.

Apart from that, my bike and $2 for lunch was really all I needed and that was my usually pocket money from the week prior. During winter I'd top that up by collecting cans from the hills at Concord Oval after big Rugby matches.

But because of the gadget age, kids have lost the knack of being resourceful and making their own fun with their mates. I don't ever remember complaining about being bored. We sometimes went exploring in abandoned buildings and even rode our bikes in stormwater canals to take shortcuts between several suburbs and generally knew what to do if it looked like rain (get outta there!) and we never ended up in any danger.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

First thing is to teach the 14 year old how to spell, and how to construct a sentence.

I have to agree but she is with her mother and that's why she can't spell properly.

QUOTE: how to spell, and how to construct a sentence.

Back when I was that age, I had to learn to make schematic diagrams of sentences. Past perfect pejorative tense and all that.
But I couldn't spel crep eather...

Make that past perfect continuous

It's good to see grammar as a subject in the primary school syllabus again after decades of neglect. To those hippy era teachers who used to claim you don't need to learn grammar my response was always: try becoming fluent in a foreign language such as French or German without studying its grammar.

We had "English" as a class in my grammar school (that's what Americans call elementary school). No creative writing, it was all grammar. We only looked at "grammar test patterns". And make the schematic diagram of the sentences (subject goes here, then the verb, and an object if there was one, and modifiers dangling below. I though I'd might get a job at a book publisher or newspaper diagramming the sentences in them. Why they'd need that done I could't figure out... As it turned out, the teachers taught to the standardised tests they had us take every year. Grammar was on the test, creative writing was not.

We did something similar, commencing in Grade 2 (age 6 or 7). Break sentences down into subject and predicate, phrases and clauses, then analyse each word for its role -- noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, etc, then describe the type of each in terms or number, gender, tense, etc, as applicable. Punctuation and spelling were part of that package. Spelling bees in class were a regular thing.

At high school a teacher told us that our most important subject was English. Was this an English teacher? No. It was the Science Master, that is the Science head teacher for the school. And he was the most dynamic teacher in the school.

His reason was that your knowledge and understanding is only as good as your ability to accurately and concisely express it in words, either verbally or on paper. You have to be able to get your message across.

That is not to decry the dynamism of English teachers. My English teacher for my last year of high school married a former student from a few years before my class. He would have been in his forties.

Both were small blokes, but full of energy.

Circa 2005, following countless complaints over many years from industry and universities about the pathetic standard of English coming out of high schools, the NSW state government determined that grammar was going to be put back on the primary school curriculum despite the objections of the touchy-feely hippies running the Education Department. Such was the period of neglect (counted in decades) that teachers, themselves products of the same school system, had to attend grammar classes before the new curriculum could be taught.

More recently (2017), the secondary syllabus has been reworked: "New syllabuses have been introduced across English, maths, history and science, which are designed to favour depth of study, rather than breadth. All English courses will include mandatory units on “reading to write” and the “craft of writing”. Study will include explicit references to structure, grammar, spelling, vocabulary and punctuation."

There is hope yet.

Don't go too overboard with the grammar and spelling, and ignore the content. I found an essay from my senior year high school English class. Essay was on "how the world will end". I mentioned several ways, viewed from various angles (humanities, scientific, political, and such) and now that I'm a college graduate, I think it still holds up. The English teacher marked off the grammar errors and misspellings and gave me a D. As if content didn't matter... Today it looks like a first draft, get the concepts down and clean up the grammar and spelling later. These errors wern't so severe that it munged the intelligibility of the essay. ....

clean up the grammar and spelling later.

The point being that the kids who came through the system in the 'hippy Ed' years are not able to do that. I had many years first hand experience of it as a manager. They are simply clueless about it. It's not their fault because they were never taught it.

Some friends of mine I have known for about 15 years have a 13 year old daughter, Actually she is not quite 13 yet, she is still 12 !!Anyway she is not your average 13 year old child.
She is 5"10 and has a attitude of a 17 year old!
She has an interest in the type of relationships a 12 year old child should not have. Well like most teens she has a phone, computer and spends her life on both speaking with ? Who knowns?
The parents got a phone call from the school to say their daughter has been sending inappropriate images over the internet and the school has informed the police.
So the police turn up at the family home and go through all the computers, phones etc etc and they discover the 12 year old girl has many fake accounts with Instagram, Facebook, etc etc.
So the alarm bells go right off and everybody goes into panic mode wondering if there is a older person involved in this??? Scary stuff!
But no there was not , it turned out, that her and anther girl were just putting the pics out there!
Not actually aiming at one particular person.
So the family banned her from all internet access and since then she has been caught 2 more times doing this type of things using friends phones at school and creating more fake accounts!
At 12!!!!!!!
Now she has been diagnosed as anorexia. Honestly I dont know what the answer is but phones and internet is causing major problems for children and they no longer can they socialise and converse in a normal way, I live near the beach and I see young couples on dates and each one is on their phone not communicating with their date! They dont know how too!!!

Im vary wary of giving phones to children and young teens .

I'm vary wary of giving phones to children and young teens .

With good reason, although it does depend on the kid's personality, maturity and attitude. Some kids actually do obey teachers and parents. I note more and more schools now banning them either entirely from the school grounds, or from the playground. I read that one affected parent complained: But how will I contact my child if I need to? Answer: Call the office!