What a week...maybe now more parents will be more cautious

Last week. What a week.

Watched anxious Greenlanders tell RTÉ’s Edmund Heaphy tales of broken sleep and nightmares about Trump invading or buying their country.

Froze at the horrifying footage of ICE shooting dead a mother-of-three in Minnesota.

Drowned in a wave of swampy, sick horror at revelations that Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok now had an ‘edit feature’ that could be used to undress images of women and create sexualised imagery of children.

“What’s happening to us?,” a woman in her eighties asked me. The world was a frightening place, she said; all she wanted to do on these dark afternoons was lock her doors, close the curtains and shut it out.

One night, as the Irish government struggled to get to grips with the horror that is at the heart of a social media site which strips away the clothing of children and adults, I felt overwhelmed by the dark power that America has become. By the sheer force of its grip on the world. By a White House which has changed beyond all recognition from a widely respected bastion of rules, idealism, dignity and gravitas to a hub of aggression and entitlement.

A state whose leader seems to just make the rules up as he goes along because the concept of Might Makes Right now prevails, even when it comes to justifying shooting a young mother in the head.

As a horrified world scrabbled to find some way to combat the cascade of digitally-created sexually suggestive, ‘undressing’ and ‘nudifying’ images, I was left wondering how, with such massive usage of social media, the Grok revelations still seemed to catch so many of us unawares.

Maybe now more parents will acknowledge the true risk involved in posting pictures and details of their children online.

Maybe more parents will stop handing smartphones and iPads to babies and to toddlers still in buggies.

Maybe more parents will get cautious about allowing children of all ages access to tech devices.

It’s not that we didn’t know about the dangers.

It’s been a very long time since experts of all kinds started to publicly red-flag the massive risk to children of becoming exposed to online predators through social media.

Face it. Allowing children access to the internet is, more often than not, about our own convenience.

And it’s landed us in a society where, rather than running around outside with their friends, playing sports, reading, drawing, playing Lego, or simply talking to each other, some children spend far too much time sitting around staring into screens.

And some of those children - perhaps your child too – are accessing violent porn, undressing other children on social media platforms, or watching content seething with sexual abuse, misogyny, racism, and hatred.

These children will, of course, grow up. Inevitably, some of them will practise what they were watching all those years when your face was turned the other way.

We know this. We have had examples of it.

Only a few weeks ago, a 26-year-old man who was convicted of possessing nearly 1.5 million images of sexual abuse involving children as young as pupils at senior infant class at primary level was jailed for 27 months. Just 27 months.

Turned out he’d begun accessing this slime himself 13 years ago, when he was 13, basically, around the age of a sixth-class primary school pupil. And yes, the incidence of children sexually abusing other children is increasing.

Dublin’s Temple Bar area, now notorious for random, unprovoked attacks on people, was, not so long ago, described by a judge as (and read this and weep, Fáilte Ireland) a “post-apocalyptic” place where gangs of youths engaged in violent behaviour.

In the end, I couldn’t bear thinking about it.

One night, in my horror and distress, I retreated to a different world. I turned back to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

To a lost world where children talk to each other, argue, play outside, read, explore, have adventures, play real chess, and rarely sit still.

A world where no child spends hours on online games or secretly accessing pornography or other forms of violent content, and where they certainly don’t download chatbots allowing them to undress each other or create sexualised imagery of their peers.

See how far we have sunk?

Seriously, wouldn’t your 11-year-old be far better off reading Harry Potter too?

Yes, in trying to encourage this, you will be up against a host of very powerful external attractions. Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft, and all the other stuff out there.

Yes, you will be up against the enormous reach and sheer will of some of this world’s biggest technology firms. Against companies which pay enormous salaries to some of the best brains on the planet to work out how to engage and ensnare your child’s mind.

But think about it. Think about the sheer harm that all this access to games and sinister content can do to your child’s mood, attention span, concentration levels, imagination, and social skills.

Start a new world order by reading with your child. Doesn’t matter that he or she is now 10 or 11. Do it anyway and do it every day.

Set aside as little as 10 minutes a day to reading with your child. Stick to it. Make it a comforting bit of family time. Make it fun. Make it about giving the child a bit of one-on-one attention.

In modern families where parents and older siblings spend a lot of time on devices, it’s reported that many younger children feel lonely. How sad is that?

Slash your child’s access to games, social media and internet-enabled devices of every sort. Do it now.