Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Screen time is safer than ‘normal’ kid stuff, but a lot more boring



My daughter is engaged in an ongoing battle with my grandchildren. The combatants, in this case Rosie and Edison, are in one hostile camp, Aubreii in the other.
Aubreii has been fighting (and losing) this particular war since the kids grew old enough to have their own “screen” devices; smart phones, tablets, Wii. If it’s got a screen, they’ll look at it. Forever, if no one stops them.
Oh, they’re normal enough kids. They have friends (whom they text and I.M. incessantly), they have hobbies (which they research online day and night), and they have school work (which they complete primarily on a laptop).
If all these screens truly gave off some sort of radiation, as the crazies claim from time to time, Rosie and Eddie would by now glow in the dark.
My daughter (who spends most of every workday staring at screens of her own) hates it. She wants her children to put those (insert expletive here) devices down and do “normal” kid stuff. “You’ve got ten more minutes screen time and then I’m collecting the tablets,” is a familiar refrain around my daughter’s home.
This is usually followed by a chorus of pathetic moans more commonly associated with medieval dungeons, hot pokers and sweaty guys wearing leather hoods.
Aubreii’s going to lose this war. She doesn’t know it yet, but she is. Eventually, the kids’ profound desire to experience life one pixel at a time is going to wear down my daughter’s resolve and the war will be over. The dust will settle and Rosie and Edison will spend the rest of their teen years basking in the eerie glow of hi-res monitors.
I used to believe, along with my daughter, that this was a bad thing. But maybe it’s not. I’ve been thinking lately, about the stuff my friends and I used to do to pass the time in the long, long ago, back when the only screen available was my parents’ black and white Zenith and the only time there was any reason to watch it was Loony Tunes on Saturday mornings.
Instead of staring at a screen all day, we did the “normal” kid stuff my daughter only wishes her own progeny would do. Frankly, it’s a miracle any of us made it to adulthood.
I don’t know what little girls do or how they think, but little boys are idiots. I was, anyway, as were almost all of my friends. We didn’t know a lot, but we knew these things: we were immortal; we would never be caught; bad things happened to others, but not to us; the more dangerous an activity, the cooler doing it made us seem.
These were the days before anyone had heard of a “soccer mom.” There were few scheduled activities for kids. During summer vacation, children were kicked out of the house shortly after breakfast and were expected to entertain themselves until being hollered in for dinner.
Somehow, we didn’t think of this as abuse.
We managed. Here are a few “normal” kid things that filled our summer hours:
1) Mumblety Peg, a game that consisted of throwing a sharp pocket knife into the ground. Whichever kid got the blade closest to his own bare foot without actually drawing blood won. I still have small scars from the games I lost. (Well, technically, if you punctured your own foot, you won by default, but it rarely seemed worth it.)
2) Jumping bikes. We would find a washed-out gully a foot or two across, set up a ramp, and then try to jump our Stingrays over the chasm. Sometimes we made it, sometimes we went over the handlebars and onto the pavement. I still have an indentation above my right eyebrow to prove that pavement is harder than bone.
3) BB guns. Any mother who thinks heavily armed nine-year-old boys playing with guns all day won’t end up shooting each other is kidding herself. I picked a lot of copper out of my arms and chest over the years. Never put my eye out, kid.
4) Stealing. A lot of my neighbors had gardens and/or fruit trees. We helped ourselves liberally to watermelon, grapes, peaches and apples. We knew we were putting our immortal souls in danger of the hellfire, but we did it anyway. Watermelon is that good!
5) Train hopping. Yup, we hopped the trains that ran parallel to Michigan Street all the time. Could have easily died or lost a limb or two, but didn’t.
6) The garage roof, from which we used to “parachute” using an old bed-sheet to slow our descent. (For the record, the sheet didn’t slow our descent enough to prevent Tommy Sherd from breaking his leg.)
The list goes on, practically forever. We roamed through drainage pipes, trespassed into the garage of a neighbor who kept his girly magazines in a box out there, waded in the leech infested creek near Highland Park, disassembled old radios in order to play with the electro-magnets buried  therein.
Looking back, I realize about half the “normal” kid stuff we did was potentially lethal. Screens and electronic devices, though tedious and boring (in my opinion) are not.
So maybe it’s a good thing my grandkids are winning the screen time wars. They’re almost sure to live to adulthood. But I worry … when they finally put childhood behind them, what will they have by way of memories?

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