It is not easy to be a parent, especially in this day and age of technology. Drew Barrymore gets frank in an emotional opinion piece that she wrote for the latest issue of Drew magazine.
In the piece, she discusses how she is parenting her two preteen girls, Olive, who is 11 years old, and Frankie, who is 10 years old, in a time when our phones, the internet, and social media dictate every decision that we make.
Drawing parallels from her own unconventional childhood, Drew, who is now 49 years old, cautions readers about the risks that can be associated with having autonomy at a young age, Us Weekly reported. She also explains why she has made the decision to not apologize for doing everything in her power to ensure the safety of her daughters.
"The ages of my two girls are now ten and almost twelve years old. And it makes me question if the experiences I've had throughout my life have been like a butterfly net, capturing the awareness of what young girls require. It could be my karma. I never in my wildest fantasies imagined that children would be in the same boat as me, experiencing an excessive amount of access and excess," the "Charlie's Angels" actress said.
Drew acknowledges that when she was a child, she had the ability to see and have practically anything she desired, and she then faced the consequences of her actions, as per PEOPLE Magazine.
"I was exposed to a great number of hedonistic scenarios at parties and even in my own home, where the viewing was of highly sensitive natures and caused me a great deal of embarrassment. As children, we are not supposed to be exposed to these pictures. In addition, I must confess that I was a great exhibitionist when I was younger because of the situations that I was exposed to. I saw it as a work of art, and I continue to refrain from doing so. However, when I published a chaste creative moment in Playboy when I was in my early 20s, I believed that it would be a publication that would be unlikely to return because to the fact that it was newspaper. It never occurred to me that there would be an internet. Not a lot of things were familiar to me," she went on.
"Now that I am a mother, I cannot believe I am in a world that I know correlates to my own personal pitfalls and many of my peers who got into too much, too soon. Kids are not supposed to be exposed to this much. Kids are supposed to be protected. Kids are supposed to hear NO. But we are living in an à la carte system as caretakers, in a modern, fast-moving world where tiny little computers are in every adult's hands," Drew added.
In the previous year, Drew gave Frankie a mobile phone as a birthday present; however, she rapidly came to regret her choice and took it away from her.
"The outcomes came as a revelation to me. The telephone was essential to life. It was infused with joy and contentment. A source of life was derived from this miniature digital box.... I wanted to put an end to these high-stakes feelings that were flying around, so I printed out every single communication onto paper. I was missing the human that I knew in my daughter, and I wanted to set down these emotions. I presented her with a stack of pages and informed her that this is not a completely dark abyss to which these journey. This is a permanent state," the actress said.
Along with pressing tech companies to implement firewalls on specific platforms for users under a certain age and pressuring schools to reconsider their attitude on whether or not to permit children to carry phones on campus, Drew is also reminding parents that it is acceptable to decline their children's requests to use their phones on campus.
"We can tolerate the discomfort that our children feel when they are required to wait. Even while we are doing what we now know to be a safer, slower, and scaffolded method, we can still be hated and know that we are doing it... At long last, I am going to fulfill my role as a father. I was looking for an adult. I also want to hear voices in my thoughts saying, 'I'm trying... I'm trying.' I want to be making an effort. Because that is the only option we have. Make an effort to figure out everything, both for ourselves and for the people who have been assigned to us to take care of," Drew furthered.
