When I was child in the late sixties of New Delhi, India, in my neighborhood of South Extension, we played on the streets, read comics and mystery books, and pestered parents and peers alike with silly questions. We didn’t get all the answers, but we went to bed tired and content. If we got fed up of the games we were playing, we invented new ones. Once we even had a pillow fight on the street! I don’t remember how we explained the burst pillows to our parents that night, but we did have a lot of fun.
Boredom was a word we didn’t know, since there was always something to do. If it rained, we sped home, changed into old clothes and sang and danced in the monsoon rains, trolled the lengths of gushing rain drains, and jumped for joy the rains had finally come. If it was sunny, we played with marbles on dusty sidewalks. Hide-and-go-seek was always a failsafe for any afternoon, be it summer or winter.
Most of the games we played had Hindi names, so they wouldn’t ring any bells in the minds of an English-speaking audience, but none of those games required anything more than our physical presence, and sometimes an old tennis ball. Other than that, all our props came from the organic world around us. Sticks, stones, flowers, leaves, piles of construction sand on which to build sandcastles, mud—the choices were endless because our imaginations were limitless. What our games did involve was a lot of running, shouting, laughing, hair pulling, and an ongoing, unceasing banter.
Today, I live in America, where I work as an interpreter in hospitals and courthouses when I am not writing novels. Therefore, my “work setting” changes constantly to give me an incredibly diverse window into current social trends. During my work day, I often see parents give six-month-old babies electronic devices, always with a screen, to keep them “busy,” quiet, and out of the parent’s “way.” Those children’s primary social interactions are coming from a machine instead of originating in the human environment around them.
As someone with a master’s degree in teaching, I see a glaring problem with that scenario: those children’s brains are passively absorbing input, they are not experiencing an exchange or undertaking the psychological exercise of responding to the unpredictable stimulus of a fellow human being. They are not problem-solving or learning about alternative options or the possibilities of different outcomes. Too often, when I dare to ask if that MO is sound, I hear the argument, “Children must learn tech skills to engage in today’s world. They have to begin young.”
Really?
Am I to believe that in the past four decades the human brain has evolved more than it had in the prior two million years? Enough that children don’t need to learn about patience, forbearance or delayed gratification or discovery through experience? These days they can simply skip all the steps of metaphorical and physical crawling, walking, stumbling, falling, crying, reacting, and trying again? It will all be provided through interaction with a video game or a video streaming device? But wait…their parents too are lost on their smart phones.
That example is one solid cue the child is absorbing for sure. To that let’s add how most “baby foods” these days comes in readymade packages—three easy steps: rip open, chew or spoon feed, and swallow. Never mind all the additives that pre-made foods contain to keep them “fresh.” Who the hell needs to cook with messy “real” ingredients when billion-dollar advertising assures us that ready-to-eat, microwavable foods are all super healthy? Of course, all the “conditions” children are diagnosed with that we are running out of alphabets to codify can’t possibly have anything to do with their highly processed diets. That’s just stupid, backwards thinking.
Playing on neighborhood streets too is unheard of, since that is plain dangerous, not to forget how today’s children wouldn’t even know what to do under those circumstances. Most don’t know how to play; they are more comfortable interacting with some expensive device. They react to the constant brain stimulation provided by digital cliffhangers, not real-life circumstances.
I wonder if they could climb a tree to save their lives, and falling, scraping their knees, and continuing to play is such a foreign concept, it belongs in last-century lore. Perhaps they know how to swim, but increasingly pastimes like swimming, hiking, skating on frozen lakes, or rock climbing are “rich folks sports,” not available to the average, inner-city child, anyway.
However, regardless of their parents’ economic standing, children today also don’t understand the intricate art of the family dynamics of sitting down to a regular meal at a dining table. When-to-speak, why-to-speak, or how-to-speak have become old-fashioned concepts.
What they do understand all too well is the unlimited choice of the internet, offering them an ever-increasing lure of items their parents can’t keep up with buying for them. Thus, they learn the folly of discontent without exemption. Does that mean I am claiming that discontentment didn’t exist in my childhood? No every child from any era can remember some peer having an expensive bicycle, or doll, or a bigger house, or a fancier family car, but at least those were items that a nice kid might have shared to ease the longings of the less fortunate in their community.
Today’s American child, instead, sees the unchecked virtual array of two million “things” that they cannot have. There is little average parental supervision to protect them from the psychological damage of marketing or consumerism. And let’s not even enter the realm of virtual predators online, preying on the mental hunger of lonely children-that is a whole other scorpion pit. My own offspring, now responsible and thriving adults, tell me that soon to come is something called Virtual Reality (VR) as if people aren’t already beleaguered to breaking point by enough virtuality. But, a decade from now, when criminal conduct increases, and children become markedly more disturbed than they are now, behavioral experts will rush forth to explain the outcome. I guess the cliché, ‘prevention is better than cure has long gone out of style.
So where is America headed? Thankfully, it isn’t a question that concerns me anymore as a sixty-one-year-old, but it certainly is a question all young parents in this country should ask themselves. And no, I am not one of those diehard oldies who are against what is loosely called progress. However, there is a reason why mass shootings begin in school age children these days, all over the United States, be it in the city, or country USA.
That reason needs urgent examination and introspection.
Does that mean I have all the answers? No. But at least I still possess the brains to ask the questions! Sane inquiry feels like a skill that is vanishing from the face of today’s earth, especially in the First World. Yes, people have “solutions” to everything. Meanwhile, the physical premises of schools in America are beginning to resemble prisons.
During each minute of each day a new tech device comes “online” to solve/answer/address another new problem. Doesn’t anyone notice how the problems are multiplying at double the speed of the solutions? That children need the attention of their parents, which they receive less and less? Yet these youngsters represent the future…and what capabilities are we equipping them with to manage that future?
I’ll leave you with those vital questions, dear reader…because sometimes the questions are more important than the answers…
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