Minimum Age for Cell-Phone Use

Willingly Enslaved Parents

The Press recently reported on a "survey" conducted amongst 115 parents or caregivers by a Unitec Master's graduate. The sensationalised "result" was that 52 percent of those surveyed believed there should be a minimum age for cell-phone use.

Laying aside the robustness of the survey (sample size, question framing, whether leading questions were employed, for example--about which no information was provided) let us accept for the moment that 52 percent is a significant percentage.

Assuming it is reasonably representative, it represents an indictment of parents and family life in New Zealand. Even assuming that no more than a third of the "parental" population think this way, it implies that a large number of parents are now so insipid, incompetent, and ineffectual that they need a law to back them up, or provide some authoritative warrant to them so that they can regulate and supervise the behaviour of their teenage children.

From one perspective this should not surprise us. Since the Government has arrogantly determined, in a quantum power-grab, to direct and control parents in their child rearing and disciplinary responsibilities, it follows that more and more parents over time will view themselves as "children" needing the support of "Big Daddy" government. It is natural that, since the State has asserted illegitimate power over families, that parents will play the game and want the State to carry more and more of the can for their children. So, since control of cell phone use is a matter of discipline, and since the State has presumed to legislate to control and direct how we discipline our children, it is reasonable, is it not, to require the state to go further and use its legislative power to provides rules and regulations for our children as well. "If you are going to tell us what to do in our homes, you also need to tell our children what they can and cannot do. Fair's fair." The train of thought seems inevitable. Hence, apparently a large proportion of parents now believe that the government needs to legislate to direct teenage children's cellphone use.

But there is a deeper malaise at work here. Our culture of Unbelief has sought to tear down every authority higher than the autonomy of the human heart. "For in the day you eat of it, you will be like gods, knowing good and evil for yourself," hissed the Serpent. With respect to its ideology of the family, Unbelief postulates that parental authority is intrinsically misguided, if not downright evil. Children are to be raised with a profound respect for their autonomy, lest the honour and dignity of their personhood be undermined. Thus, parents may make suggestions, entertain, divert, reason, channel, guide, facilitate--but above all, parents must not command and control. This, we are told, is damaging to a child and a blasphemous contradiction of their human autonomy.

When children become teenagers they start to have tastes and ideas of their own. Raised within the orbit of individual autonomy they quite reasonably start reflecting and asserting in their teenage years the equal validity of their opinions, tastes, predilections, and preferences as over against their parents, or anyone else, for that matter. After all, since birth, by a thousand subtle techniques and methods their own parents have been indoctrinating them into just this very notion. And so they got the point, the state-run schools they attended sang daily from the same hymn sheet. The poor kids never had a chance. They were conditioned from birth to believe in their own autonomy and self-authority.

A point in time inevitably comes when parents completely lose control of their children; or, to put it another way, children become uncontrollable. The structures of authority have eroded away. Having denied God, and made themselves gods, modern Unbelieving man is suddenly confronted with the slavery of atomistic autonomy. Instead of raising their children to be in respectful subjection to their parents, the parents are now subject to their children, whose views, wishes, and opinions are to be accepted as equally authoritative and valid.

Of course the world and human culture cannot continue to function without the skeleton of authority structures. So the newly enslaved and subjected parents appeal to a higher court--the State. Whilst they have lost authority they hope that the State might re-assert it on their behalf to "prove" to their teenage children that cell-phones, for example, are bad until they reach a certain age. The "proof" consists of the naked dictat of the State. Autonomy is believable only to the point where someone bigger, meaner, stronger, and more bullying cuts you down by force. As the old saw has it: everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others.

If over half the parents in Athens believe that the State needs to pass a law to ban their teenagers from using cell-phones we can see where the culture of human autonomy has led. It has resulted in a state of powerlessness, and a spirit of enslavement. An insatiable appetite for laws upon regulations, rules upon statutes emerges. And so the soft-despotic, velvet power of the State grows and grows, with each passing decade and administration. We become a race of Sharkey's little helpers, always looking to the bosses on the hill.

The Devil is the world's first, greatest, and leading slaver. The progressive enslavement of the human race has always been his goal. His preferred modus operandi has always been subtle insinuation. The emergence of soft-despotism in the West is his most subtle work thus far. Society is progressively being enslaved to a beneficent government and all the people love it. His handiwork is becoming more and more evident as Unbelief takes hold in our culture.

Thanks be to God that our Lord Jesus Christ has come forth to destroy the works of the Devil. The Serpent has been cast down, the Ring which binds in the dark has been destroyed. As we call men to the Saviour, they will once again breath free air.