Playing In The Electronic Woods

In the world of fairytales, kids only ever had to be worried about witches, wolves, and evil stepmothers. They might be thrown into an oven, or be poisoned or killed by having their head lopped off by the edge of a trunk (“The Juniper Tree”). Life for children who heard those fairy tales was easy. Now they have to worry about being ‘over-wired,’ at least according to Time magazine in the March 27 article, “The Multitasking Generation,” by Claudia Wallis. The big concern is that kids are not able to absorb knowledge effectively when they are instant messaging, listening to music and typing a few lines at a time of an assignment for school. Ooooh scary to see kids lost and entangled in the forest of wires.

Of course, there are all the other usual suspect fears of kids getting stalked by online predators, of them getting into drugs, becoming addicted to games, being desensitized to violence by the media, being sexually promiscuous, joining a cult, staying up too late, smoking… Remind me – why do people have kids in the first place? Add to this the fears of having your child killed at school by another student. (Mind you, a study on school violence in the U.S. in 1999 showed that a child was three times more likely to be killed by a parent than by a fellow student.)

There’s no question these are all potential problems. But if we just focus on the media problems for a moment, let’s do a little cost-benefit analysis. Most parents consider TV time as dead brain time. Kids could be playing sports (if there was sufficient space set aside for them to do this, and if parents weren’t worried about bullies and predators and traffic). Or they could be involved in clubs or other activities (because we don’t want them being over tasked electronically when we could be filling up their kid-sized daytimers with appointments and meetings and tutorials). But I’m not always clear on what the main fear about TV actually is. Is it that kids sit there, seeming stoned and unmovable for hours on end? Or is that kids will be influenced by inappropriate role models and lessons they pick up from TV? Which is the danger: inattention or too much attention? It can’t be both because one would seem to preclude the other.

But why aren’t parents more excited now that kids have so many things to take them away from TV? Don’t computers and the internet offer them greater avenues for creativity and knowledge gathering? Ah, but the computer is just a TV with a mouse. Same problem of inactivity. Well, then, video games offer more brain activity at least, right? Kids can get pretty intense playing these. But it’s still a relatively passive pastime and there’s the risk of overexposure to violence and even sexual content. Add to this the long-standing bias against games in a work-obsessed culture and that’s it for the Xbox.

But then there’s instant messaging and cell phones which help create a community of close or distant friends and keep the child from becoming too isolated. But this is the wrong kind of connection. What they need is closer physical ties with children in their neighborhood, but maybe not closer ties to the kids that are too rough or are a bad influence or whose parents are unpleasant or allow their own kids to do things that you won’t let your kids do. Or who read their kids those scary fairy tales that you can’t imagine why anyone would ever write for children in the first place and thank God for the Disney versions.

My solution to all of this – and keep in mind, I’m not a parent – is the same as my solution to keeping kids relatively germ free. Go roll them in the dirt now and again. My technique is inspired by recent studies showing that kids may in fact be more susceptible to disease and allergies as they grow older if they were kept in a mainly antiseptic environment. So, if media is dirt to you, then roll your kids in it and let’s see what happens. Then send them to bed with a good old fashioned fairy tale. Let them have nightmares wherein they gradually learn to problem solve and work things through in their dreams, just as they work things through in the stories they see on TV and navigate the world all by their lonesome on the electronic waves.

Sure, you’ll be there looking occasionally over their shoulder, but you can’t protect them from everything. And you have lives that need living too, remember? And there are dangers aplenty that perhaps crowd into your mind every time the child in you has to learn something new or meet someone a little frightening. Maybe in adulthood you finally feel strong enough to face those things you put off confronting as a child. And sometimes it’s easier to face the dangers your child has to confront than the ones that howl on your own doorstep right now.