Why I Banned My Children From Facebook.

It is a dilemma faced by many a modern parent, what to do when your children start spending so much of their time on the Internet social media?

If one of Britain’s most popular actresses had her way they would all be playing outside instead of obsessing about Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat.

Hermione Norris, star of Cold Feet, The Crimson Field and In The Club, said: “Thankfully, my two are too young at the moment for social media. My attitude is, ‘Get outside into the garden, get as dirty as you can, play. Be a child.’”

Ms Norris admits she does not have much time for much of what passes for modern communication nowadays. “I don’t care for any sort of social media. I’m not on Facebook either. I’m not even keen on email; it’s too invasive,” she said, adding:

“I mean, how many different ways do you need to communicate? What’s wrong with simply talking to somebody? I was chatting to a member of staff at my children’s school the other day. She’d come across ten teenagers in a room, each on their phones. She said, ‘Why don’t you just talk to each other?’ And they said, ‘We are’.” Ms Norris’s concern for her children’s well being led her to leave London and move to Dorset with her husband, Simon Wheeler, a TV producer she met while working on Wire In The Blood, and their children Wilf, 10, and Hero, seven.
She told the Daily Mail’s Weekend magazine: “I’d fallen in love with the county when I used to go for walks along the Jurassic Coast in-between bouts of filming Cold Feet. But our principal reason for moving was the children’s education, because the schools there are very good.
“It makes it a bit tricky for work, but I’d rather have my family in a safe haven. When the school years are over though, we’ll go back to London.”
The actress, whose role in Cold Feet as Karen Marsden, a stressed middle-class mother with a radical left wing past, made her a star, returns to our TV screen in the New Year in the second series of Kay Mellor’s In The Club, about a group of new mums.
But she has also just finished an intriguing side project, recording a new Christmas Words for You album, reading a selection of Christmas poems with the likes of Jim Broadbent and Joanna Lumley. She reads In The Bleak Midwinter – a hymn about the birth of Christ – which was read at her Christmas wedding
“It always makes me cry,” she said. “One of the things I love about my job is that you never know what the next offer of work is going to be. My task was to understand what I was reading, then make it accessible to the listener. This is genuinely something I’d buy to play in the car or in the kitchen when I’m preparing Sunday lunch.”
Ms Norris is also appearing in Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death, based on a comic crime novel by MC Beaton, on Sky 1.
“I’ve been very lucky so far with work, perhaps that’s why I don’t think it will suddenly stop when I hit 50,” she said.