It is hard not to feel grumpy and deprived when you read of exciting developments designed to keep precious and, more importantly, precocious children safe from themselves and the big bad world (or should that be wolf?).
Questions must be asked about the parenting abilities of those of us who ignorantly raised our children to adulthood without the benefit of such gizmos and gadgets.
I know we can argue that we were doing our best, but our offspring, pouring their hearts out on some future designer leather couch funded by the fat fees they are paying, will see us as irresponsible.
We might have insisted they wore seatbelts, sunblock and bike helmets, but what were we thinking of, letting them out of our sight, sometimes for hours on end, without a high-vis vest between them?
It brings me out in hives to think I let my lot walk to school (and other places, if I am being brutally honest) without the protection of a walking bus. The fact the school was only a couple of minutes' walk away was no excuse.
And, what about times outside school? Could they have been tree-climbing, playing in mud and water, or pyromaniacs in training? It doesn't bear thinking about.
It is a pity there does not seem to have been a great deal of enthusiasm so far for the microchipping of children in order to track their movements at all times. Being parked permanently at a computer terminal clocking their every step would have been such a positive parental past-time. I imagine I would have emitted a warm worthy glow, to rival the glare of the computer screen. I expect it would have circled above the top of my head.
I am sure I would have been better at that than following their fumbling fledgling footsteps using a cellphone. Most of the time I don't have my state of the ark phone with me, or if I do it is not turned on.
Then, any messages I send either contain completely incorrect lettering because I cannot see what I am doing or are so truncated their recipients need a code-cracker to decipher them.
Over the years, I have tried to convince the offspring such communication is brain gym, but they lazily do not want to rise to such a challenge.(Another reason the parenting could be called into question, but let's not go there.)
Now that my sons have almost all flown the coop, I feel envious of parents who can use a new drug-testing kit for children which does away with that messy business of urine.
It involves hair-testing. What could be simpler than collecting 90 to 120 strands of hair - a pencil diameter's worth (more if the hair is less than about 3.75cm long or extremely thin) - cut as close to the scalp as possible?
What fun it might have been, tiptoeing over festering towels and other detritus on the floor of the teenagers' rooms, to cut off a thin dreadlock or a ringlet in the dead of night with only the eerie glow of the streetlight to guide my scissors (dipped in the gin bottle before proceeding as my version of the requirement to clean with an "alcohol wipe").
If the little darlings noticed the absence of hair, I would treat them for ringworm and blacklist the cat. The split ends would justify the means.
I would have been enthusiastic about finding out whether they had been using marijuana, amphetamines, methamphetamines, opiates, ecstasy, cocaine or phencyclidine in the last 90 days. Such virtue would have allowed me to ignore their alcohol and tobacco consumption.
I'd have grumbled about why the $225 cost could not have covered a test on whether a green vegetable had passed their lips in that time and when they last showered and changed their undies. It would have saved everyone the nuisance of having to talk about anything.
I would have struggled with the instructions on how to prepare the hair sample for sending to the lab. They resemble a cross between origami and rolling a cigarette (not behaviour the responsible parent would want to model, surely).
I would have given no thought to what I might do with any results containing bad news. There would have been no need for that because I know anything which has cost you money has an intrinsic value.
One thing that might have bothered me would have been how to interpret the closely shaven head. Would I have had to conclude the teen was a drug addict trying to avoid the test, or as a truly responsible parent would I have been required to arm myself with the tweezers and pluck hair from elsewhere?
Suddenly, being a fuddy-duddy seems wholesome, like a natural high.
- Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
