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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