Screening Ourselves from the Truth

Photo credit: Arénie

Everyone knows that putting cell phones in the hands of toddlers is inadvisable; I say it spells the end of humanity. 

"Children should be seen and not heard." We modern parents decry this antiquated idea by which children were not properly valued. Such attitude toward children led to the innovation that "working-class children should only work nine-hour shifts in factories with a lunch break." The attitudes toward childhood in the Industrial Revolution were spectacularly cruel. Child labor? Physical punishment? Even in the Victorian bourgeoisie, children were outsourced to nannies and only really valued once they reached adulthood. There was little understanding of child psychology, little valuing of the importance of childhood.

Our society being one of extremes, we have gone through various child-rearing philosophies since, from the free-range mentality of my parents' generation, where children were turned out of doors and readmitted only for dinner-time; to the latch-key generation of my youth in which we walked home alone but then boarded up with the TV; to the terror of the present day, in which we only allow children outside if we can track their every move on their cell phone, or we shadow them physically, bored out of our minds. Or we conjure the Victorian philosophy of child-rearing, and silence our children from being any sort of disruption by shoving a device in their hands and calling it keeping them safe.

In order not to be labeled a 5G fanatic--you know, the kind of weirdo who also eschews seed oils, sugar, and experimental injections--I won't talk about how putting cell phones in the hands of children is dangerous because of the exposure to electromagnetic fields, a danger which the federal government has officially declined to research. I won't even mention the damage that this can cause to their cellular development and future fertility. I'll stay mum. Instead, I will talk about how I view the use of devices around children as a form of child neglect, a forfeiting of their imaginary development, a betrayal of the most important line of communication for a child--that between child and caretaker. 

Most people reading this, having forgiven my curmudgeonry in order to continue reading, will themselves be old enough to remember long car rides in which boredom enveloped the body like over-proofed dough, and siblings reached through the stickiness to tug at each other and squabble and squeal. Or they'll remember something like timing the seven-hour ride home from Montreal to coincide with bedtime, but instead of their flannel-clad toddler placidly sinking into sleep, they'll remember listening to her pontificate the entire night on the color of the moon, the fastness of the car, quizzing them on all sorts of philosophical essentials of the toddler mind. They'll remember their version of the toddler who spent long stroller rides singing one song after another until her playmate clapped his hands over his ears in desperation, "She won't stop singing!"--his own sophisticated ruminations on the foibles of adult humans vexingly disturbed by her melodic experimentation. Or they'll have memories similar to that of the toddler who fished a drawing notebook out of the bottom of her stroller and spent her long commutes exploring Dadaism (accurately forecasting New York City's current state). 

These readers will understand my despair when I see one child after another clutching a phone while in the stroller, completely tuned out of whatever is happening on the outside. Just as distressing is watching children look around, confused, while the caretaker is deep in conversation with an invisible entity, headphones plunged deep into her earwax. My daughter and I were on a crowded subway recently, and a baby no older than sixteen months peered at us with long-lashed, worried eyes. She was perched in the middle of a huge buggy, and her mother, a crunchy Brooklyn type, was deep in some sort of word game on her phone. The energy of the subway was loud and abrasive enough that I kept my 11-year-old tucked up close; it seemed obvious to me that the baby must feel isolated and overwhelmed. The noise and commotion merited a mother's large hand on her head, or holding on to her tiny digits. No miniature human is equipped to process New York City deprived of a parent's reassuring touch. Similarly, when I see a parent dutifully carrying a baby in a pouch but then holding a phone up behind the baby's head so that all that the child sees is a blank face, I cry inwardly. How can a parent be choosing to miss out on the gaze a baby casts into her face, the gaze that deciphers every flicker of her eyelids, the gaze that interprets all there is to understand about the world through the play of shadows on the parent's face, the reassuring locking of eyes, the eloquence of attentive silence?

Attention is a currency. You pay it out. (Or in a more gently transactional language, perhaps, you lend it--"prestar atención.") Attention is an active exchange, enjoyed both by the giver and the receiver. Toddlers, diminutive emperors of the universe, expect to receive it paid to them lavishly as they proceed from one activity to the next, their guardians at their train, righting royal slips, mopping up royal spills. Eventually, the slavish ministrations become tiresome; the toddler discards the purple cape and learns to lend attention to his fellow humans (expecting full return of the attention, with interest, until... well, near adulthood). What does it do to a little sovereign to miss out on commanding this attention? Placated from every royal fit by an impersonal device that detracts attention from the fellow human and from the inner source of the frustration, the little sovereign does not earn the safety of strict, loving words and a strong hug; the little sovereign does not learn to self-soothe--even at the cost of an ear-splitting tantrum first. 

In hunter-gatherer societies, elders are tasked with teaching babies the skills of generosity, of exchanging attention. Babies are placed on the laps of elders who practice games of give and take, using facial expressions to express the corresponding emotions. Parents calmly humor children's effervescent interference in their work until the young ones lose interest in the parent's activity and move on to the next excitement. Children learn the basics of adult activities and of communication through imitation and group play. In our society, except for the regulated group interactions at school, children are encouraged to self-isolate with screens. Meanwhile, in the middle of rural New Jersey, I've seen signs for "Social Skills Classes for Children and Teens." On the edge of the soccer field, I spoke to the wealthy VP of an investment firm; she complained that in this new generation, the young workers come to her office, plug into the computer for a day's work, and then after a few months they'll stride up to her and ask her how they can get a promotion.  "Can you tell a joke?" she'll ask. "Have you ever had a conversation with a colleague over coffee?" She recounted how her company, which invests the funds of the hyper-rich, had to take action to help the children of her clients who were regularly becoming victims of trolling and abuse over the internet. Her company had to create a social skills class for these over-privileged children. "The instructor had to teach them how to read facial expressions. How to read facial expressions!"

The idea of social skills classes is absurd; no, more than absurd: tragic. What is the ability to read another person's sadness but the foundation of empathy? The observation of a trusted adult's reactions to the sounds around her sharpens the child's own hearing. Processing the world from the safe sphere of a parent-bound space permits a child to adventure outward mentally and emotionally, and slowly decipher the meanings of the interactions observed. Watching the human drama unfolding to varying degrees in any public setting is the precursor to Psychology 101, Intro to Sociology, and Fundamentals of Literary Character Building. The attention paid to the velvety buds on the trees or the spider abseiling from the bench is the starting point for the conservationist mind (not the empty preaching of "climate change," which means nothing, truly, to anyone). When children are encouraged to cut themselves away from such observation to focus themselves on a screen, whole worlds of possibility are lost. The word "focus" originates from the Latin for fireplace, domestic hearth. What does it mean that the center of the modern child's home has become a flat surface that asks for little expenditure of emotion or intellect in its use?

How can one measure the tragedy of the fact that so many parents in our society are themselves so spent, exhausted, bored, bereft of optimism, that they are unwilling to put every last bit of energy into the raising of the precious beings they love? Parenting is exhausting. My older daughter was terrified of a picture book called Monster Mama, because she recognized the hyper realism of the titular character (thanks to my frequently losing my sorry mind around five minutes past bedtime). The irony, though, is that the parents in my circle who put the extra effort into keeping their children away from screens have had a huge pay-off in energy in later years. Their children spend hours reading; they enjoy conversing with adults over meals; they understand jokes and they have vivid ideas of what they want for their future. Putting the extra time into rearing children with intense focus (around the hearth) is actually a wonderfully selfish proposition. 

But I continually return to my concern over the parents who have let go of the idea of being the center of the hearth for their children. Let's put aside for a moment the worry over the shrinking of a child's imagination, the diminishing of his self-assurance, and his inability to converse with ease, all due to a lack of exercising these skills at a young age. What disease in our society is encouraging parents to let go of a huge amount of their authority over their own children? Loving parents shrug haplessly over an admitted lack of control over their children's choices. I have been shocked at stories of children who have made irreversible life decisions (around vaccines, hormones) without their parents' consent. I contend that the attentive parents, the ones who invested the most attention in their children's upbringing, are rarely facing such issues. The attention paid (listening to endless stories and inane chatter while cooking dinner or folding laundry or walking to the subway and vainly trying to have a thought,) earns the parent capital in the attention the child later pays to the parent's demands and advice. We all know that a lot of the peer pressure involved in children's dangerous life choices now comes from social media. But social media does not hold sway over the children in my circle who were raised without screens as an important focus of their lives. Those children defer to their parents. And rightly so. With all the mistakes that we monster mamas make, no entity--neither the virtual world, nor the state--should ever prevail over the authority of the loving (non-abusive) parent. 

So what is the source of this powerlessness, this shrugging of parental responsibility that I see manifested in the increasing acceptance of screens as co-parents? What is this infection of apathy that is taking over our society? Apathy represents one of the basest and most destructive of emotions. Apathy permits the empowering of corporate forces (such as Big Pharma) over our lives; it allows the government to commit abuses in our name, to pursue wars we don't support; it permits us to hand over our children's education to people pursuing an agenda we did not agree to; it ultimately makes us care less about our own conscience, our own intuitive powers--the intuitive powers that are most crucially engaged in the life choices we make for ourselves and our children. It encourages the disastrous idea that we have no free will and no agency over the better future that desperately needs our active creation. Our apathy invites totalitarianism. If we allow ourselves to raise a generation that does not engage passionately and constantly with the human and natural world around it, we are nurturing our own demise.

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