Carrie Bickmore has revealed that she will never let her 11-year-old son walk home without a mobile phone after a terrifying incident occurred last week.
On Tuesday night’s episode of The Project, Bickmore recounted the moment her eldest son, Ollie, failed to come home from school on Friday and she couldn’t get in touch due to him not having a mobile phone.
“I made Ollie walk to school, even though I was so scared he was going to get hit by a car,” she told her fellow panellists.
The mother-of-three revealed that she originally wanted Ollie to walk home so he can learn to navigate roads without the use of Google Maps.
But after he didn’t return at his usual time, Carrie now wants him to carry a mobile phone at all times.
“Everyone says, ‘Don’t give them a phone too soon, don’t let them on social media’. And then he didn’t come home from school,” she said.
Extremely concerned, the 38-year-old immediately began blaming herself for the situation.
“I went into an absolute trepidation and was like, ‘Why haven’t I given him a phone? I can’t work out where he is’,” she said.
Thankfully, she soon discovered the reason why he hadn’t made it home in time.
Ollie’s last lesson of the day was PE, which occurs off school grounds. Students are taken to and from the venue by bus.
The bus transporting the students back to school broke down, and Ollie was unable to let his mother know due to not having a phone.
“All that had happened was that the bus had broken down that was bringing them … back from sports practice [to school],” she said.
“And [at] that moment, I vowed that I was going to know where he was at all times.”
That’s when co-host Peter Helliar, who is a father of three, stepped in saying, “All it takes is a tiny bit of fear, and you reverse everything you’ve put in place.”
Carrie and her long-time partner Chris Walker share two children together: Newborn baby Adelaide and four-year-old daughter Evie.
Oliver is her only child from her late husband Greg Lange, who passed away of brain cancer in December 2010.
