Reach home without a phone

We want to start this month with a question rather than an answer. It is one we have not been able to put down, and over the next few weeks we are going to try to earn the right to answer it properly.

Here it is.

If your child needed you this afternoon, really needed you, could they reach home without a phone in their hand?

Not the ordinary day. The other one.

We do not mean the ordinary day, when the phone is charged and in their pocket and everything works. We mean the other day. The one where it was left on the coach. Flat by two o’clock. Slipped out of a bag in a crowd. Or simply not allowed past the school gate, now that the rules have changed.

We rarely plan for that day, because for twenty years we have quietly assumed it will not come. We charge the phone. We track the phone. We tell them to look after the phone. And most of the time, that is enough.

But “most of the time” is a strange standard to hold for the people we love most.

A thought we can’t shake

Lately we have been sitting with how much of a child’s safety now hangs on one small object staying charged, present and permitted, and quietly wondering whether we have all, without noticing, been protecting the wrong thing.

Here is a small piece of it. Most children today could not tell you a single phone number by heart. Ours may be the first generation that would struggle to get a message home from a stranger’s phone, even standing right next to a willing one.

We are not going to tell you where we think that leads. Not today. That is the whole point of starting here. We would rather build the case slowly, and have you arrive at the conclusion with us, than ask you to take our word for it.

So for now we will just leave you with the question, and ask you to sit with it a moment longer than is comfortable.

Could they reach home right now, without a phone?

More on this very soon. If you’d like to follow where it goes, keep an eye on the blog over the coming weeks.