THE BATTLE BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND GOOD MANNERS

What do you mean this isn't responsible parenting? It's Diet.

Of the many challenges parenting presents, perhaps the curliest is trying to stay cool. It's a flawed argument of course, your kids will never think you're cool and the older everyone gets - you, them - the more uncooler you'll become. That won't stop you trying of course, especially if you're a dad.

No dad wants to be the bad guy. We're the ones who say, "Yes."

As in, "Can I have Coke on my Weetbix this morning, dad?"

"What would your mother say?"

"I've never asked her."

"Well, I s'pose so then. But make sure you screw the lid back on properly."

See? Dads don't get any cooler than that, right?

Or how about this classic?... "Dad, look at these awesomely sharp sticks we found! Can we hit each other with them?"

"I s'pose there's no harm in that. As long as you don't draw blood. Try to avoid the eyes please."

This weekend though, I discovered I was even less cool than I thought. We'd been invited to a dinner party, and when I say "we" I mean me, the Domestic Manager and both monsters. The great fear of all kids in these situations is the threat of extreme boredom. Specifically, what if there are no other kids there? Will I have to listen to adults talking about boring shit all night? Will there be a TV there so I can watch whichever reality singing competition is playing tonight?

As it happens, there's been a recent development in the glennzb household my kids thought might combat the looming boredom threat; the mighty iPad. And when I call it mighty, obviously I mean, ALmighty. Somehow, and I really don't understand how, although it might have something to do with Orewa College's progressive policy towards one-to-one devices, we've gone from being a no iPad family to a 2-iPad family in the space of about 10 days. This now takes the number of mind-sucking, personal electronic devices in our house to around 20 or so. It's hard to nail down an exact figure.

The point is, the kids wanted to know if they could take their iPads out to dinner with them. No matter how cool a dad you're desperate to be, you've got to draw the line somewhere. I said no, and they took it well I thought, considering telling a kid they can't use their iPad is a bit like telling a crack addict he can't have his fix, or someone who works in breakfast radio the coffee machine's broken. (I've actually been faced with this last nightmare scenario a number of times and lived to tell the tale... somehow)

"You can't turn up at the door with your iPads under your arms," I explained. "It's one thing worrying you'll be bored, but if you B.Y.O. iPads, you're effectively picketing their house with placards that read, "YOU'RE BORING!"

(I'm sure there probably IS an app to actually turn your iPad into a placard. If not, remember who had the idea first, striking activists)

So we arrived brandishing 2 nibble platters, a bottle of wine and no iPads. The good news was, there were plenty of other kids there to keep mine occupied, not to mention a dog and some cats. The bad news was, they had all brought their iPads. Including the dog I think, although he could have been sharing one with the cats.

Boy did I feel like an old fuddy-duddy then. How Dickensian of me to keep my precious kiddies offline for a WHOLE EVENING. I was lucky I wasn't had up for child abuse, forcing them to suffer under such an oppressive, 3rd-world regime.

Really? Has it really come to this? Are we really going to let our progeny plug themselves into cyberspace and just leave them there indefinitely?

Don't get me wrong, I loves me a gadget. In fact, I loves me gadgets more than just about anything. But geez they can be antisocial. I certainly can't claim any kind of innocence or immunity from their brain-numbing influence either; after all, there's no point in listing something on TradeMe if you can't check how many views you've had every 3 minutes via your smart phone.

Remember when YOUR parents would tell you to stop watching so much TV and that you should go out and do something useful? Oh, how times have changed. If only I could get my kids to pay attention to the telly - the X-Factor is on, but one of them's too busy Viber-ing her mates to notice, while her sister is creating her own personal fiefdom on Minecraft. As I've already admitted, Mum and Dad aren't exactly setting a sterling example, given I'm just clearing a few work emails on my awesome Nokia Lumia and the Domestic Manager has at least 2 separate Facebook accounts to maintain.

Are we just getting smarter, is that it? Have our brains become so much larger over the eons, we now require more stimulation to fill up our attention spans? Or is it an evil inter-planetary takeover plot, masterminded by body-snatching aliens using video games and the interweb to lull us into submission? It'd certainly save on starships and plasma bombs.

We need to get rid of these devices. All of them. The phones. The iPads. The laptops. The lot. Gone. Surely we can just replace them with a WiFi router hardwired directly into our brains. That'd make it a lot easier to pretend we're listening to the dinner conversation when we're ACTUALLY updating our profile pic.

I left some of our computers out of this photo so it wouldn't look too excessive