kids ipads

The local café, Sunday morning. Your correspondent is there when it opens, to write another deathful screed. The local families start to arrive about two hours later.

It’s a young family area. Or at least, it’s a young family café, concrete floors and raw-wood big tables, the requisite two novel items on the breakfast menu among a sea of smashed avo. It is, to a degree, a toughening-up obstacle course for toddlers. There’s nothing like belly-flopping on a concrete floor to really reinforce the concept of object permanence, and every corner of every table could have your “I” out.*

But that doesn’t matter because they are instantly, almost all of them, put on screens. Tablets, iPads, phones are handed out even before the old VB long necks of purified water are placed on the table.

Yeah, I know, I know… I can hear the parents scream that another childless** correspondent is about to make a pronouncement on parenting. With the usual refrain “you don’t have a clue”, etc, etc, and the assertion that parents are already starting to limit screen time, etc, etc.

Fair enough. But one thing when you’re struggling to summarise Lukacs among a gaggle of gabbling families — aside from stimulating some reflection on life choices — is that you have observer status. Like Jane Goodall among the apes, you are first not minded, and then not noticed.

The thing one does notice, now and in decades past, is that parents tend to reinforce each other’s values. There’s probably a social evolutionary necessity to that. Parenting styles will vary by culture and class; within the matrices of both, they tend to conform.

Thus, in the 1980s and ’90s, one noticed the fierce defence people put up of huge amounts of stranger-based childcare, from a very early age. Not only could contrary opinions as to whether this was a Good Thing not be discussed, the very possibility that there could be a contrary opinion could not be discussed.

Except quietly, one-on-one, parents with a teaching/nursing/social care background would say that, yeah, they weren’t crazy about it, knew that it had negative effects, were worried about the deeper effects.

That silence led to, and was concluded by, the ABC childcare debacle, when it was suddenly realised that people were handing their kids over to a care supermarket run by a mildly cultish egomaniac, and floated on the open market.

Looking at a two-year-old being handed a phone before they have even looked around the place, and looking around yourself, and seeing that nearly every kid is in the same situation, you have to ask… You have to ask whether we have collectively lost our minds, to simply let this happen without thinking — really thinking — about it. You have to ask whether this is a conspiracy of tired parents who simply will agree not to raise the issue, if you won’t either, in a situation that really demands the opposite approach.

Humans are not going to become vacant automatons just because they watched too many [insert current child obsession here, Miley Cyrus? Minnie Mouse? Hogarth? I don’t know]. But it is possible to get things wrong within cultures, and to do so for decades at a time.

Thus, Europeans look aghast at the British habit — still — of sending eight-year-olds to boarding school, the relatively unreflected-upon process of managing no-fault divorce in the ’70s and ’80s had its effects, and certain features of the modern curriculum may be producing young adults of excessive sensitivity, and insufficient internal fortitude (which is then added back, like soluble fibre, with “resilience” training).

We need to get accustomed to the idea that social change will come faster as technological change increases, and hence, so too will the need for a reflective and reflexive response to such.

The screen, after all, is a very strange thing. It essentially presents two orders of the real — vision and sound, vision above all — as the totality of the real, and invites the viewer to project a three-dimensional reality into a two-dimensional presentation.

The screen hovers between the reality, the dream and abstracted information. It is like nothing else that has ever appeared on the earth — and until about 15 years ago, its domain was limited by fixity, of furniture or room.

Now it is among us, everywhere and all the time, presenting itself like one of the family, though it may be the stranger at the feast.

 

* A Lacanian joke so obscure someone should call the cops.

** To the best of my knowledge, fnarr fnarr, Helllooooo my dear, sun’s over the yardarm somewhere in the bloody empire, gin and it’s all round, wot!