Life is also what happens from when the children tell you “mom, dad, put down your cell phone” until you tell them. The rite of passage to high school - some kids start when they are 12 - is one of the popular moments to give them the keys to their own digital playground. They would not be precocious: almost half of the children between 8 and 11 years old in Barcelona have a mobile phone, a City Council survey calculated last year.
The mobile “contract” between parents and children is a formula that has gone viral on social networks because it generates a lot of conversation and, furthermore, is very polarizing. These are more or less friendly rules to define the schedules, tolls and the possibilities of that world that opens up in your hands with a mobile phone with an internet connection. The format that Fernando de la Rosa tweeted this Monday (@tinonet) contains nothing more and nothing less than 28! rules for your 12 year old son.
“It is a remix of some previous works such as the @FundacionANAR with its renowned contract. In my case I have modified many of the points and I have removed the formality of the contract,” she explains in a thread with more than 700,000 impressions. It includes points regarding 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 will not be able to download anything without consult us first”) but also what parents do (“If you think that we do not comply with the rules, tell us. Our example is the best way to teach you how to use these devices”).
In addition to jokes about whether there was no way to shorten the 28 rules, in the responses there are those who believe that nothing is as one imagines (“I come from the future. It is not fulfilled”) or that this must be shortened by principle (“The best rule is not to give him any”).
There is also some reflection of beginning to look at ourselves, adults, and our use and abuse. In the end, Cortázar and the clock happen to us and we are the ones given: “Think about this: when they give you a watch, they give you a little flowery hell, a chain of roses, a dungeon of air.” Most of us, with hours of leisure spent scrolling every day, would not pass the filter of the child's manual when he is still a child and tells you "leave the cell phone now."
