We’ve just finished with Sinterklas - the Dutch festival that is actually bigger than Christmas here. There are weeks of buildup - shoes being left by the fireplace and mysteriously filled with presents to be found by excited children the next day. The Sint comes in the night and takes the little poems and letters the children leave in their shoes, sometimes there is even a carrot in there for his horse Amerigo. In return, he leaves little gifts, chocolate letters, pens, notepads, small toys - just precursors to the huge sack of presents the kids expect on the night of December 5th.
My eldest daughter asked for and got a diary with a lock. She’s a secretive little thing, and unlike her sister who blurts out every insignificant bit of stream of consciousness that floats through her brain, trying to get information from Daughter No 1 is like trying to get orange juice from a stone.
She answers in monosyllables and I know I have no hope of finding out the causes of her fluctuating moods, or even who her best friend is for that week. So it makes me happy to see her creating her own outlet as she diligently fills out copious notes in her new diary every night. But I won’t deny that its crossed my mind to take a sneak peak in the diary to give me a couple of clues to her inner life, which I so crave.
So far I’ve resisted the temptation, and felt pretty sanctimonious about it too.
Until I came across the spate of stories on cyber bullying that is. Today a diary with a tin key. Tomorrow Facebook, Hyves and text messaging. My secretive girl’s thoughts will be secret no longer. Kids may be occasionally cute and funny, but as the cliche goes, they’re also cruel. And there’s nothing quite so cruel as a pack of little girls. I remember it well. So once she joins the on-line multitude, should I still act like a responsible human being, respect her privacy and keep away from her inner thoughts? Or should I be a responsible parent and monitor what she’s doing or what others may be doing to her?
Apprently kids’ innate cruelty is magnified by the anonymity of the internet. Will my angelic child become the bullied victim of the cool kids in class? Or will she join them and become a bully herself? There’s no way of knowing, because much as we parents tell ourselves that we know our kids, the truth is that they’re actually better at hiding stuff than we are at digging it out.
I only have to hope that the equalizing, no-nonsense, sober nature of Holland will protect my kids from the worst excesses of the globalized laid-bare world they’re growing up in.
And I will have to come to some kind of decision about the privacy vs protection issue. I can resist the temptations of the locked diary. But what will happen when she graduates to the computer? I have no idea. Stay tuned to this space.
