Featured Image Credit: Instagram/TheRadfordFamily/Channel 5
Topics: Parenting, Social Media, Technology
Joe Harker
Topics: Parenting, Social Media, Technology
Sue Radford, the mum from 22 Kids and Counting, has revealed one of the main rules she enforces in her family.
She and husband Noel have, as you might have guessed, a grand total of 22 kids with the eldest in their thirties and the younger ones not quite old enough for primary school.
Parenting 22 children sounds pretty difficult and they did say that during the lockdown when almost the entire family was living together in one house the food bill was immense.
They've been the subject of several TV shows and have been dubbed 'Britain's biggest family'.
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However, in their house mum makes the rules and she recently revealed one which applies to all of her kids.
Speaking to OK!, Sue said she wanted to protect her kids from social media, with the youngest members of her family not allowed into that digital thunderdome.
With that in mind she's backing the government's plan to ban mobile phones from certain places like schools.
Her rule is that none of her kids are allowed to have a phone before they're 11 years old in addition to not being allowed on social media.
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Whether she's able to enforce this bit of her rule we don't know, as Sue has two eyes and 22 kids so she can't tell what they're doing all the time.
Her family has faced trolling online and while she now no longer reads the comments, Sue did see some on a post containing pictures from her daughter Ellie's 18th birthday which were 'shocking' as people were 'accusing her of having an eating disorder'.
However, it's not just online that Sue and her family receive hate, as she told OK! about an unpleasant in-person encounter in a supermarket.
She said: "I was in Sainsbury’s when a woman huffed at me disapprovingly and gave me the most filthy look - it was like she wanted me dead.
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“When I challenged her she told me she thought ‘a lot of people’ wanted to give me the same look. It was awful."
As for what the ban she's supporting is all about, it looks like phones will be banned not just in classrooms but from schools altogether.
Right now headteachers in England get to decide their school's policy on phones, but a new ban would make the decision for them.
Then again, lots of schools already ban students from bringing in phones, but everyone basically does bring theirs in anyway and either sticks it on silent or switches it off and tucks it away in some part of their bag.