Are you smarter than a seven-year-old

No.

He’s been at home all week. Well actually, it has been two weeks, it all just blurs into one when you have so much mahi to do but you can’t do it because you’re parenting and your child wants all of your attention, all of the time. It was Monday of the second week when I said to him “mama just has to finish this little bit of mahi so I need to just focus for a bit”.

And in that time, which was maybe 20 minutes max - good lord. He walked over to me and said “phone for you mama” and it was my friend Tam who informed me that my boy had messaged her and almost everyone else in my Whatsapp contacts list with:

Can you please subscribe to galileanplayz on YouTube Please

Can you please subscribe to galileanplayz on YouTube Please

It is a very cool channel

With a cool boy named Ronnie

How did he set up a YouTube account? How did he do that without an email address? How did he do it so quickly? How did it already have five subscribers?

I cannot even set up a YouTube account! One of the subscribers is me?

“Well mama”, he said, in the most wow, are you really this slow? voice he so often uses on me: “I just logged in as you I know your password you should change it it’s very easy and that’s how I subscribed to my channel which I set up with a new email you have to put 2007 because you have to be 13 for email but anyway are you going to watch it mama are you going to watch my video will you watch?”

I knew there would come a time when my child’s intelligence eclipsed mine. I am, after all, not the sharpest tool in the shed. I can’t even use Excel. I haven’t quite worked out how to turn my phone off so I just mash the three biggest buttons together to try to do it. It took me the longest time to work out how to turn my flashlight off - I used to say “Siri turn flash light off”.

But I didn’t think it would be this soon.

My husband and I call our eldest upstairs every time we can’t work out how to use the TV. He says “can’t I just show you?” in an exasperated tone and we say “no honey, we will never learn”.

I am an old dog, in just so many ways, and there are no new tricks.

He named our backyard a conservation park on Google Maps and it took me an entire day of watching multiple videos to work out how to remove it.

When we removed the Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome apps we felt quite clever, until he used Siri to get into Google.

I will no longer smirk at Boomer tropes about the inability to use technology - because I’m literally that guy. When did this happen? When did I crossover?

When did I stop being the person in the office older people ask for social media advice to? Now I’m the older person asking advice. How?

My husband isn’t any better, he needs constant help to get into his email. We’re suddenly two bogans bumbling through life trying to work out how the printer works.

Is this some kind of rite of passage? You just one day realise your kids are smarter than you? One day you wake up and your ability to understand technology is done.

Sometimes I’m so frightened by it. How are you meant to keep your child safe from the evils of the internet if they’re better at using it than you are?

I was thinking about this when I considered my first forays on the internet. In my friend’s dad’s office we used his computer to type ‘A/S/L?” (for Age/Sex/Location) - using ICQ to fall in love with grunge guys from Seattle who definitely knew Kurt Cobain and were definitely not old men from Hamilton.

We made jokes about ‘cybering’. We called 0800 Join The Party on sleepovers while our friends had to deal with the phone bill a month later when their dad found it and lost his mind. We searched Rotten dot com and looked at photos of gory accidents, Googled ‘celebrity dead bodies’ and dared each other to look. We downloaded viruses on our parents’ work computers and they had to get a Rent A Nerd to fix it. Just because we didn’t have phone cameras to take pictures of our feet to post to grotty grandpas, it doesn’t mean we weren’t doing our best to drown as we surfed the web.

All of this happened under our parents’ noses. They had no idea what ICQ or MSN or AOL messenger boards were. No idea what dodgy things we were doing.

It’s not that I think our parents were stupid, just that they had too much going on to know what ICQ was. And their concern over MySpace, Bebo, and emerging social apps were eclipsed by needing to pay bills, keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. They were old dogs and we had the news tricks.

Oh how I have come full circle.

My only reassurance that I’m not too unintelligent to parent my child is that I know potentially more about their online life (Minecraft, Roblox, Worldle) than my parents knew about mine and I turned out O-

OH GOD I AM SHUTTING DOWN OUR INTERNET.

Photo by bert b