By Jessica Anstice
In an impressive act of persuasion, a clever Pakenham teen convinced her parents into letting her have a mobile phone in her bedroom at night time.
Fourteen-year-old Kelsie Hopgood’s Shark Tank-style pitch was well thought out, humorous and even contained statistics which she sourced via her friends based on whether or not they were allowed their phones in their rooms.
The pitch, in the form of a PowerPoint, titled ‘Why should Kelsie have her phone in her room at night?’ brought amusement to her responsible mum, Julie Hopgood.
“Kelsie’s been annoying us for some time now, asking if she can have her phone in her room overnight,” Ms Hopgood explained.
“We’ve always said it has to stay out of her room because she can’t be trusted.”
While the nerves settled in on her big night, Kelsie gathered her family into the lounge room, ready to present.
A lot of work evidently went into the creative teen’s pitch which included slides showcasing ‘Reasons’, ‘Why do I really need it?’, ‘Points’, ‘My final reason’, and a dedicated question and answer session at the end.
“I’m a very responsible fourteen-year-old I would say – a very responsible middle child,” her opening line stated.
Her humorous sarcasm seeped through as she went on to say how she is “such an intelligent child” and knows what is right and what is wrong.
“Do you really want your favourite child to have no friends because she doesn’t have her phone at night?” she asked.
“Don’t answer that, it’s a rhetorical question and I know what that is because I’m an intelligent child.”
Maintaining a calm tone with gratitude, mid-way through her slideshow Kelsie included a graph which revealed statistics based on her friends’ free wills in relation to the topic.
“After asking eight of my friends if they slept with their phones in their rooms, the statistics show that six out of eight sleep with their phones in her rooms,” she explained.
However, when question and answer time rolled around, she was pulled up by her dad.
“Now you’ve asked eight friends but you’ve got 10 in the column there, and you’ve got four that said no. I’m not really understanding the layout of your graph there?” he joked.
Her honest response was, “I needed to make it look fuller.”
So the million-dollar question: Did it work?
Still reluctant, Ms Hopgood has put Kelsie ‘on trial’ for the weekend.
“There were deliberations that went back and forth so she’s on trial at the moment,” she said.
“Her first slip up and it comes back to us.”
