It’s National Family Week and to mark it some interesting research has been released on how technology affects family life.
Apparently parents spend an average of 1,500 minutes on the phone to family members over the course of a year, as well as sending an average of 312 emails and 600 texts messages to their children.
Those figures aren’t much of a surprise to us: we know from the parents amongst our 4.2m customers that they spend a lot of time catching up with their children, especially on the phone.
Indeed we recently launched our 500 mobile minutes package – which gives people 500 inclusive minutes to call mobiles every month for a flat fee of £5 – to help with just this kind of situation.
Modern technology has allowed parents to keep in touch with their kids much more often than before – and in our view this is very much a good thing. But parents don’t want to worry about the cost while they’re on the phone to kids who may well be grown up and living away from home. Our own research found that over half of parents avoid calling their children on their mobile for fear of it being too expensive, so a monthly bundle of minutes for a fixed price is the ideal solution.
Of course, new technologies like mobile phones and the internet always bring a variety of positives and negatives to our lives when we start using them. They might be a distraction at mealtimes – the research found that a third of families ban gadgets from the dinner table – but in our view, the positives far outweigh these negatives.
As National Family Week’s spokesman, Nick Henry, said: “Advances in technology have had other advantages, such as allowing families to communicate over long distances, brought young and old together and helped to prevent feelings of isolation.”
We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.
So how have mobile phones and internet access changed your family’s life?
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