Gadgets at the table?

[Saluki]

Actually the ones I feel sorry for are kids in a buggy with Mum chatting away on the phone to invisible friends rather than to the child. I used to natter to my children then natter with them once they could answer. No idea if it will have any long term noticeable effect on their language development.

We go to a client's home, to groom their dogs, where the daughter started school, full time, in September (part time at Easter time) and has very little in the way of language skills. Both parents are glued to the TV and their tablets - in fact I have never seen 'mum' move. She just sits on the floor, in the same spot, every time I've been over the last 18 months. I cannot understand a word that the daughter says, she speaks in a baby talk and doesn't form her words at all.

Interestingly, our new neighbours have 4 kids. The little girl is 5 and, although she speaks a little shyly as she's deaf in one ear, she has excellent diction. Her Mum is picky about when the TV is on, internet time is limited and she talks, reads etc to all her children. Youngest lad is around 8 and chatty, youngest doesn't really speak much yet, also very shy. Her 11 year old, who has Aspergers, is as bright as anything, learns like lightning and has been bugging me for a fortnight to learn to play a guitar. I showed him D & A last night and loaned him my old and rather tatty acoustic to practice on. There is no TV or internet at family meal times in that home and they all sit around the table to eat too.

I think that there might well be a link with language development but I suppose time will tell, proper studies too.

No internet while we eat either. When we go out, phones are in pockets as we do need to have them with it as the transplant people have our numbers for when a transplant becomes available. We don't want to miss it!

 

[nickyboy]

Our rules are quite straightforward although the 14yr old struggles with them sometimes.
We always sit down around 6pm to eat at home and the TV gets switched off for the duration of the meal. No phones, tablets, laptops etc at the table. When we go out for a meal, no gadgets at the table. Immediately before and after, snapchat/instagram to your heart's content but if you try to do it at the table I'll throw your phone in the soup.

 

[SatNavSaysStraightOn]

Our rules are quite straightforward although the 14yr old struggles with them sometimes.
We always sit down around 6pm to eat at home and the TV gets switched off for the duration of the meal. No phones, tablets, laptops etc at the table. When we go out for a meal, no gadgets at the table. Immediately before and after, snapchat/instagram to your heart's content but if you try to do it at the table I'll throw your phone in the soup.

On one occasion in the past, (I brought my brother and sister up (there are 17 years between us)) I could not get my brother and sister to stop watching the TV. every time I turned my back, it was back on. In the end I walked into the kitchen, got the kitchen scissors, walked calmly back to the TV, unplugged the TV from the wall... counted to 10 and then cut the plug off the TV.
Needless to say, they don't argue with me anymore!

 

[Globalti]

In Salford they throw their tellies out of the windows of the tower blocks; I know because I've seen the impact craters in the pavement.

But that's probably not because they want to stop their kids watching TV; it's probably because they can't be bothered to carry those big old cathode ray TVs down the stairs, with the lifts being broken and whatnot.

 

[Retribution03]

I don't talk when I'm having a meal I just eat it then ill chat.i don't see a problem with using gadgets whilst having a meal as we eat food because we have to I've got lots of time to chat to the wife or kids...However if you are out having a social meal then it would be bad manners to ignore the people you are out with and also to be talking on a phone in a restaurant etc....The other thing that bothers me is when people call you from inside a nightclub with all the background noise the phones gets put straight down but that's another story lol

 

[ColinJ]

In Salford they throw their tellies out of the windows of the tower blocks; I know because I've seen the impact craters in the pavement.

But that's probably not because they want to stop their kids watching TV; it's probably because they can't be bothered to carry those big old cathode ray TVs down the stairs, with the lifts being broken and whatnot.

Ha ha - Read THIS!

 

[arch684]

people with their eye's glued to a phone can be quite entertaining saw a guy fall over a bin in asda car park last week

 

[Cubist]

We insist on a family meal at the table every day during the week, and phones stay off. Cubette can check to see who is calling if it's a match or training night (she coaches a netball team and plays in another) and the same with me as I coach one rugby team and manage another, otherwise it's eat and chat.

 

[I like Skol]

it's a well-known statistic that 70% of visitors to Britain's national parks never venture further than 100 yards from their cars. This is why the National Parks have a policy of siting the "facilities" around the periphery of the park

Sooooo glad I/we do not fit into this demographic. The Skol family have just returned from a weekend in the Lincolnshire Wolds and when we arrived on Saturday we had lunch then drove to nearby Binbrook for a planned walk. 5½ miles round trip following some vague directions copied from the internet (lots of 'cross this field to the style at the other side then cross this field to the style in the far corner'). Not a navigation aid in sight and definitely no texting or tweeting during or after the walk. It took us a couple of hours and when we returned to Binbrook we piled into the local for a refresher and borrowed some darts from behind the bar so we could play a 4 way game of 201. We had a great game (I won of course ) during which we talked, worked out scores (darts is great for kids numeracy skills) and discussed the walk and the plans for the rest of the weekend. As I type this out I can't help feeling that this is the way all families should be?

 

[ColinJ]

Sooooo glad I/we do not fit into this demographic. The Skol family have just returned from a weekend in the Lincolnshire Wolds and when we arrived on Saturday we had lunch then drove to nearby Binbrook for a planned walk. 5½ miles round trip following some vague directions copied from the internet (lots of 'cross this field to the style at the other side then cross this field to the style in the far corner'). Not a navigation aid in sight and definitely no texting or tweeting during or after the walk. It took us a couple of hours and when we returned to Binbrook we piled into the local for a refresher and borrowed some darts from behind the bar so we could play a 4 way game of 201. We had a great game (I won of course ) during which we talked, worked out scores (darts is great for kids numeracy skills) and discussed the walk and the plans for the rest of the weekend. As I type this out I can't help feeling that this is the way all families should be?

It IS how families should be. Increasingly though it is stare at gadgets, and drive everywhere - children can't walk, even a fool knows that!

 

[John the Monkey]

You do not go far enough. I, for one, forbid the reading of novels.

There is another evil arising from a too early attention to Novels. They fix attention so deeply, and afford so lively a pleasure, that the mind, once accustomed to them, cannot submit to the painful task of serious study. Authentic history becomes insipid. The reserved graces of the chaste matron Truth pass unobserved admist the gaudy and painted decorations of fiction. The boy who can procure a variety of books like Gil Blas, and the Devil upon Two Sticks, will no longer think his Livy, his Sallust, his Homer, or his Virgil pleasing. He will not study old Lilly, while he can read Pamela and Tom Jones, and a thousand inferior and more dangerous novels. (http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/knox.html)

Do not such histories as "Tom Jones," and even the celebrated Richardson's "Pamela," tend to sap the foundation on which delicacy of mind, modesty of deportment, or even virtue is built[.] This foundation undermined and destroyed, what safeguard from gross vice, has the youth, whose mind is not yet imbued with the principles of that religion, which requires purity of heart? Surely no one, who knows the strength of man's natural depravity, and who is a friend of man, can wish to add such fuel to the flame already raging in his breast. (ON NOVEL READING (from The Guardian; or Youth's Religious Instructor, 1820, pp. 46-49) http://www.merrycoz.org/books/NOVELS01.HTM

 

[LCpl Boiled Egg]

There's something sad in seeing a couple in a nice restaurant, both on their devices, ignoring each other. Why bother going out for a meal if you're going to do that?

 

[ColinJ]

There's something sad in seeing a couple in a nice restaurant, both on their devices, ignoring each other. Why bother going out for a meal if you're going to do that?

I could meet the most interesting, attractive, witty woman on the planet, but if she whipped out her phone during such a meal with me and started texting her mates, or using Twitter or Facebook, that would be that - game over!

 

[Fnaar]

Dinner chez Fnaar*

(not really, we're middle class: no gadgets at the table, most meals taken as a family, all food hand-sourced from Lidl)

 

[SatNavSaysStraightOn]

[QUOTE 3360627, member: 259"]Talking of gadgets at dinner tables, has anyone got one of those incredibly useful electric cruet sets that shine a light on your dinner as you season it at the mere touch of a button? [/QUOTE]
no