by margaret hillcroft

Created on: November 30, 2008   Last Updated: December 01, 2008

I really see no reason to "BLAME" anyone at all. Everyone involved in the syatem has responsibilities. I think parents are between a rock and and hard place wheni it comes to bringing up children , in a highly consumerist society, to see life as more than a series of "must have" experiences.

Take the PC as an example. Several years ago, the computer was made available to the general public for the first time. They were expensive to purchase yet , at the touch of a keyboard, opened the door to a whole new way of living. With the coming of Windows and the internet, computer ownership spread and access to all kinds of programmes, educational and otherwise, was established. Schools leapt aboard the bandwagon and before too long, every child was taught to use the PC from primary school upwards. Schools urged parents to buy PC.s for their children, inferring that not to do so was negatively affecting their educational chances. Soon, nearly evry child was accessing the internet and using computers on a daily basis at home and at school and demanding more software and hardware, gadgets and gismos with each year that passed.

As a parent, I did not particularly like computers. True, they can be a very useful tool. Yet they are open. like anything else, to abuse. I did not want my children to have one. I could see that without a great deal of monitoring and restriction on use a PC could become more addicitive than the television which I was already having regular wars about! The pressures to get one installed in my home were phenomenal. I was disadvantaging my children at school if i did not. I was depriving them of opportunity. I was old fashioned and not moving with the times. This is 2000 AD and kids need computers. Yet all the time I was aware of the potential for my children to be swallowed up by all the PC offered in terms of games, chat rooms and so on and conscious that they were being exposed to an enormous section of the public and the media I could never hope to moniter adequately. In the end I am sorry to say I caved in and it wasn't long before we became three computer family.

I cite this as an example becuase it was not advertising that did this. It was the education system which saw computers as the way forward. It was not TV advertising which caused my children to feel they were the most deprived kids on the block. It was a huge social change which swept through every establishment and organisation in the western world. And I know as a parent it would have

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