Pre-Screening

On a podcast I listened to recently, someone was lamenting how phones are impacting our children.  “They’re losing their ability to imagine!” this person said (or words to that effect).  This is quite common on podcasts these days ... and television shows ... and movies ... talking heads on “news” shows ... everywhere, really.¹  And my usual take on this² is to point out that our society has been through this before: videogames were making them violent, and heavy metal music was making them worship Satan, and D&D was getting them into actual witchcraft, and television was killing their active thinking, and movies were making them inured to violence, and rock-and-roll was destroying their morals, and reefer was driving them to madness, and comic books were exposing them to adult themes, and even, once upon a time, books were making kids soft by distracting them from going out to play like “normal” kids.  But this time it’s different ... right?

Let me tell you one of my favorite stories about my father.  You may recall (from a previous blog post) that he’s a record collector.  And you may even recall³ that his collection has a hard cutoff, which I believe is 1979.  In our family, he’s somewhat infamous for shitting on my and my brother’s musical taste.  For everything from rap to heavy metal—and, in particular, for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which he has an inexplicable hatred of—he can be heard to proclaim decisively “they can’t sing, they just scream” and “it sounds like a bunch of stray cats fighting” and sometimes just “that just isn’t music, son.” And, once, after he’d said that, I remdinded him that he grew up in the motherfucking fifties: during the foundational years of rock-n-roll, when parents holding their ears and decrying their children’s choice of listening material is practically a stereotype.  “Dad,” I pointed out as gently as I could, “isn’t ‘that’s not music’ exactly what your parents said to you when you were young?” And he furrowed his brow, and shook his head, and responded, with zero irony or self-awareness whatsoever, “yes, but that was different.”

See, we all think we’re different.  Our grandparents no doubt remembered the whole “get your nose out of a book a go outside and play” thing, but still somehow fell prey to the “comic books are trash” meme because that was different: books were literature, but comic books?  Different.  And then our parents shook their heads at how out of touch our grandparents were when they couldn’t understand this new art form of rock music, and then immediately did the same thing when heavy metal came around.  That’s not music: it’s different.  And then we came along and did the exact same thing with videogames: why, yes, our parents did tell us that TV was going to rot our brains, and obviously that was stupid, but Grand Theft Auto is different.  Kids today.  What is the world coming to?  Get off my lawn!

So, is the thing with the phones different?  Well, as a fan of balance and paradox, it shouldn’t surprise you that my opinion is that it both is and isn’t.  And I’m a bit pleasantly surprised to see that, 14 years after writing that post, which seemed radical and a bit weird at the time, the world seems to be coming around to my way of thinking.  “Both things can be true” is a common phrase on the Internet these days, or, as the great sage B Dave Walters is fond of saying: “¿por que no los dos?”⁴  In other words, why pick only one?

See, I think we can all pretty clearly agree that heavy metal doesn’t make kids suicidal, but that doesn’t mean that some kids didn’t commit suicide after listening to metal music.  And it seems pretty clear these days that violent videogames don’t lead kids to commit violence, but that doesn’t mean that some of those school shooters weren’t playing Call of Duty or whatever.  This new panic that we seem to have developed about how our children are losing their ability to connect to human beings because of their phones?  That’s almost certainly bullshit.  But that doesn’t mean that, if you have a kid who is prone to social awkwardness or avoiding the vagaries of human contact and social interaction, they won’t use their phone as an excellent excuse to go all in on that tendency.

All kids are different, even within the same family.  For instance, I’ve had three.  Two of them I’ve had to restrict how much chocolate they eat because they would just eat till they were sick; the other never even considered it, so I never put any restrictions on them.  Two of them would play videogames for hours and not be willing to stop when it was time for dinner (or anything else); the other never developed the habit.  Two of them would run up vicious phone bills by streaming YouTube videos in the car; the other never found that particularly interesting.  And, in those three examples, none of them are the same two kids as any of the others.  That meant that I neeeded to impose restrictions on some but not others, and, you know what? that was fine.  Too often we become convinced that we have to treat all our children the same, or it won’t be “fair.” But the problem with this theory is that the kids are not the same.  They need to be treated differently exactly inasmuch as they are different from each other.  Or, to look at it from another angle, they need to be treated the same in the abstract, using the same founding principles, but the specifics need to be different, because they need to be customized for each child.

I think what it all comes down to is, we need to keep an eye on our kids.  We need to engage with them, and talk to them, and, most importantly, listen to them.  Preferably starting when they’re young: if you wait till your kids get to be teenagers and try to start talking to them then, you may end up sounding like that classic scene from Better Off Dead, and that’s no good for anyone.  But still better than nothing: don’t think it’s too late to start treating your kids like people just because you didn’t start out that way.  Beacuse I believe that, as long as you’re listening to your kids and noticing where they struggle, you can at least try to do something about it before it gets too serious.  And there’s no need to blame the Internet, or their Playstation, or their Metallica albums, or anything else.  If they didn’t have any of those things, they’d just find something else to fixate on.  And I think most any parent who’s tried to take something like that away from their kids can confirm: they’re either going to find a way to use it / watch it / listen to it / experience it anyway, or find something else to replace it with.  Because these things are symptoms.  Not the cause.  Never the cause.  Even though we think: this time ... this time ... it’s different.

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1 Paula Poundstone is particularly obsessed with it.  One of the (many) reasons I had to give up her podcast.

2 For instance, I touched on it in both one of my D&D posts and one of my AI posts.

3 But only if you read the footnotes.

4 If you don’t speak Spanish and aren’t inclined to instantaneously Google Translate, that means “why not both?”