My daughter has recently entered that stage of development where she would rather spend her time fixated on a ten-inch screen than have anything to do with another human being.
I would like to say this is a phase she will grow out of, but realistically her father spends his working life staring at three screens and has successfully worked with the same two colleagues, across two different companies, for around a decade without ever actually meeting either of them.
Meanwhile, I spend my days either attempting to shovel sustenance down our daughter’s throat or attached to my own screen writing books, help guides and blog posts.
So genetically, the odds of her ever resurfacing into the real world are not in her favour.
Her first proper foray into the virtual world is, as I suspect is the case for many children of Gen Z onwards, Minecraft.
What I know about Minecraft could be written on the back of a postage stamp — something most of Gen Z probably wouldn’t recognise — with room to spare.
Most of my knowledge comes from teaching in the early part of this century.
And doesn’t that sentence make me feel old.
Back then, I occasionally had to settle disputes between friendship groups because someone had pushed somebody else’s sheep into a lava pit in retaliation for the theft of an Ender Pearl.
That sentence makes as little cognitive sense to me now as I’m sure it does to many of you.
I dealt with these situations in much the same way I dealt with most teenage arguments: adopting the facial expression of someone who completely understood the gravity of the situation while internally wondering why on earth anyone cared about a fictional sheep.
Apparently they cared deeply.
Fast-forward several years and Minecraft has returned to haunt me through my own offspring.
For the past few weeks, I have been making vaguely encouraging noises whenever an iPad is shoved approximately three inches from my face and I am instructed to admire various cuboid forms.
They are all purple.
Purple is her favourite colour, and therefore I assume that if my daughter ever becomes an architect, entire cities are going to look like they were designed by Ribena.
I have been shown a house.
A bed.
A maze.
Several caves.
And, on one memorable occasion, a guard horse wearing armour.
I did not have the heart to tell her that the guard horse looked suspiciously like a llama.
There also appeared to be a pig chasing a carrot on a stick in the background.
I didn’t ask.
There are some things a mother simply does not need to know.
Fortunately, her father has downloaded Minecraft himself and has become our resident translator.
He has reassured me of two important things.
Firstly, everything she is saying apparently makes sense. Words are coming out of her mouth that sound like the deranged babblings of someone several days into a fever dream, but apparently Endermen, Creepers, Redstone and Nether Portals are all legitimate things and not evidence that I need to contact a medical professional.
Secondly — and considerably more importantly — she is playing in a mode that does not allow her to interact with other humans.
Because while we are happy for her to disappear into her bizarre cube world, we are not happy for her to disappear into the internet.
There is a difference.
Yes, we want her to have friends.
Yes, eventually the online world is going to become part of how she communicates with those friends.
But her father and I have been around since the birth of the modern internet.
We know what people online are like.
We remember chat rooms.
We remember forums.
We remember being teenagers online while our parents had absolutely no idea what we were doing because they thought the computer was basically an expensive typewriter.
Frankly, the fact that our generation survived early internet access with nothing more serious than questionable usernames and an encyclopaedic knowledge of MSN Messenger emoticons is something of a miracle.
Our daughter is eight.
She is autistic.
She can be extremely literal, incredibly trusting and utterly convinced that everyone else is operating according to the same rules she is.
That makes the internet something we have to introduce carefully, rather than simply opening the door and hoping for the best.
And the statistics aren’t particularly reassuring.
Official UK data has repeatedly shown that a significant proportion of children experience bullying or harmful behaviour online. Research also suggests that autistic and other neurodivergent children can be particularly vulnerable to cyberbullying and online exploitation.
And bullying isn’t even the thing that frightens me most.
Children being contacted by adults online isn’t some hysterical parental fantasy. Grooming existed when we were teenagers sitting in chat rooms listening to the dial-up modem scream, and it exists now.
The technology has changed.
Human beings, unfortunately, have not.
So no, our eight-year-old isn’t allowed unrestricted internet access.
She isn’t allowed to chat with strangers.
She isn’t allowed into games where random people can contact her.
And anything with a chat box immediately makes me suspicious.
Maybe some people will think we’re overprotective.
I’m fine with that.
Because I don’t need to understand what an Ender Pearl does to understand safeguarding.
I don’t need to know why someone would build a purple cave, why a pig is chasing a carrot or why my daughter’s heavily armoured guard horse appears to be a llama.
I just need to understand the difference between allowing her to explore something she loves and giving strangers access to her while she does it.
So Minecraft stays.
I will continue to admire purple cuboid structures while having absolutely no idea what I’m looking at.
Her father will continue translating sentences involving Creepers, Endermen and whatever the hell Redstone is.
Our daughter can build houses, dig caves, construct mazes and apparently assemble an entire private security force consisting of badly identified livestock.
She can disappear into her bizarre little cube world to her heart’s content.
She just can’t talk to strangers while she’s there.
After all, her father and I survived the birth of the internet.
We remember what we were doing when our parents weren’t looking.
She doesn’t stand a chance.
