When you are with your child, put down your damned phone

The other day, we saw a three-year-old boy running excitedly on the bike path with a huge grin on his face.  His mother--we assume that was the relationship--was a few steps behind.

Nothing unnatural thus far, right?

Except that the mother was texting on her smartphone as she was walking.  And when she was done, she jogged to catch up with the boy.

If such a scene had been a rare occurrence, then I would not be worried.  But, it is not rare.  This has become the new normal, it seems.  Parents talking not to the kids but to somebody else on their smartphones.  Or texting. Or catching up on Facebook.

I suppose such highly distracted parenting will only worsen, which makes me all the more relieved that fertility rates have fallen to historic lows.  I would rather that people did not have children if they are going to be abandoning kids like this.

We have rapidly transitioned into a new world that runs against our own evolutionary mechanisms:

The new parental-interaction style can interrupt an ancient emotional cueing system, whose hallmark is responsive communication, the basis of most human learning. We’re in uncharted territory.

Unchartered, indeed!  There is decreasing levels of back-and-forth between children and adults.  I don't mean parents alone.  When I was growing up, it was not merely parents.  If they were not around, then I--like pretty much all children anywhere on this planet--was engaged in a back-and-forth with other adults or older children.  All these responsive communication helped all of us grow.

A problem therefore arises when the emotionally resonant adult–child cueing system so essential to early learning is interrupted—by a text, for example, or a quick check-in on Instagram. Anyone who’s been mowed down by a smartphone-impaired stroller operator can attest to the ubiquity of the phenomenon. ... “Toddlers cannot learn when we break the flow of conversations by picking up our cellphones or looking at the text that whizzes by our screens,” Hirsh-Pasek said.

It is all getting messed up!

Of course, parenting has always been associated with distractions.  A few days ago, a friend-couple recalled how when they were doing chores at home, their toddler daughter wandered into the yard--the door was accidentally open--and took a few sips of the lighter fluid.  Every parent has at least one awful story to tell.  But, that occasional distraction is different from the smartphone-distracted parenting of today:

A tuned-out parent may be quicker to anger than an engaged one, assuming that a child is trying to be manipulative when, in reality, she just wants attention. Short, deliberate separations can of course be harmless, even healthy, for parent and child alike (especially as children get older and require more independence). But that sort of separation is different from the inattention that occurs when a parent is with a child but communicating through his or her nonengagement that the child is less valuable than an email. A mother telling kids to go out and play, a father saying he needs to concentrate on a chore for the next half hour—these are entirely reasonable responses to the competing demands of adult life. What’s going on today, however, is the rise of unpredictable care, governed by the beeps and enticements of smartphones. We seem to have stumbled into the worst model of parenting imaginable—always present physically, thereby blocking children’s autonomy, yet only fitfully present emotionally.

All these don't add up well.  A brave new world!

Anxiety and the nanny state

In my early years of graduate school, I came to read about--and watch on television as well--the free speech movement at Berkeley, and how Reagan, who was the governor of California then, could not stand those student protests.  Reagan perhaps even owed his political successes to the radical movements, which he attacked and capitalized on in his culture war against freedom in many ways and for many people.

Fifty years later, we continue to fight those same culture wars of free speech.  But, oddly enough, young people these days prefer restrictions on free speech, and seem to be even losing faith in freedom!

protecting children from needless harm became conflated with shielding them from stressors and uncertainties (such as having to solve everyday problems, like getting lost, on one’s own) that are critical for developing personal independence.

Those raised on free speech movements turned around to protect and shelter their precious kids so much that now these young adults are scaredy cats who don't want to be free!  On college campuses, it has taken on crazy forms:

Colleges and universities have exacerbated the problem of dependence by promoting what is sometimes called a culture of victimhood. American college students (who are some of the safest and most privileged people on the planet) are to be protected from, and encouraged to be ever-vigilant about and even report, any behavior that could cause emotional distress. Feelings and experiences that were once considered part of everyday life, such as being offended by someone’s political views, are now more likely to be treated as detrimental to mental health.

I get angry and depressed with trump's words, yes.  But, that idiot saying whatever pleases him is the very mark of freedom that makes America different.  How can college-age adults--the key word is "adults"--not understand freedom of expression?

One of the reasons is: Fear and anxiety.

Anxiety is the most common mental-health disorder in the United States, affecting nearly one-third of both adolescents and adults, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

That begins right from when they are children:

Suniya Luthar, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University who has studied distress and resilience in both well-off and disadvantaged teenagers, has found that privileged youths are among the most emotionally distressed young people in America. “These kids are incredibly anxious and perfectionistic,” she says, but there’s “contempt and scorn for the idea that kids who have it all might be hurting.”

What are the adults doing?

In a seemingly well-meaning effort to help kids avoid what makes them anxious, administrators actually make anxiety worse. “Anxiety is all about the avoidance of uncertainty and discomfort,” Lyons explained. “When we play along, we don’t help kids learn to cope or problem-solve in the face of unexpected events.”

And, given that you have been reading this blog for years, you know well there is one major factor behind an increased level of anxiety these days: Social media!

Anxious kids certainly existed before Instagram, but many of the parents I spoke to worried that their kids’ digital habits — round-the-clock responding to texts, posting to social media, obsessively following the filtered exploits of peers — were partly to blame for their children’s struggles. To my surprise, anxious teenagers tended to agree. At Mountain Valley, I listened as a college student went on a philosophical rant about his generation’s relationship to social media. “I don’t think we realize how much it’s affecting our moods and personalities,” he said. “Social media is a tool, but it’s become this thing that we can’t live without but that’s making us crazy.”

When these kids grow up ...?

Lyons sees a connection between how some schools deal with anxious students and what she worries is a generation of young people increasingly insistent on safe spaces — and who believe their feelings should be protected at all costs. “Kids are being given some really dangerous messages these days about the fact that they can’t handle being triggered, that they shouldn’t have to bear witness to anything that makes them uncomfortable and that their external environments should bend to and accommodate their needs,” she told me.

You can now see why college students now actually favor restriction on expression.

A few years ago, there was a young woman ready to graduate from the Honors Program.  She was heading to law school on the east coast after graduation.  Her only sister was already in London working on her graduate degree.  I asked her what her parents thought about their two daughters going so far away from home, from Oregon.

Her response was awesome.  And says a lot about her parents.  The parents apparently always told the two daughters that their task was to help the daughters grow their wings, after which they expected--and wanted--the daughters to fly on their own.

At graduation, I met her parents.  I shared with them what their daughter had told me.  They smiled.  They were happy.  No anxieties.  No fear.  No worries.  But that was a decade ago, and apparently life has changed a lot since then--seemingly for the worse!

What will I be if I didn't waste my time?

The doodling and time-wasting that I do now is not anything new; it is a continuation of how I was in graduate school, which itself was no different from my undergraduate days.  Of course, the four years of time-wasting in Coimbatore seemed like I had perfected the art of wasting time all through my growing up years in Neyveli.

Wasting time is all I have been doing all these years.  What a joyful life it has been!

Today, I doodled away making this:

Well, ok, I "wasted"--and continue to waste--time by reading anything that interested me, whether or not I really understood them!  In my graduate school years, I thought I had died and gone to heaven when I came across magazines that I never even knew existed.  From the New Yorker, the Economist, and the Atlantic, which I later started subscribing to, to a whole bunch of others that were my library staples, of which Public Interest,  Dissent  and Commentary were my special favorites.  I think I had built up within me images of old-time  intellectuals gathering at cafes and universities in New York and wished that I were there.  Especially the 1930s and 1940s environment that Irving Kristol experienced at the City University of New York:

 The center of the lunchroom, taking up most of the space, consisted of chest-high, wooden tables under a low, artificial ceiling. There, most of the students ate their lunches, standing up. (I looked upon this as being reasonable, since at Boys' High, in Brooklyn, we had had the same arrangement. To this day I find it as natural to eat a sandwich standing up as sitting down.) Around this central area there was a fairly wide and high-ceilinged aisle; and bordering the aisle, under large windows with small panes of glass that kept out as much light as they let in, were the alcoves-semicircular (or were they rectangular?), each with a bench fitted along the wall and a low, long refectory table in the middle. The first alcove on the right, as you entered the lunchroom, was Alcove No.1, and this soon became most of what City College meant to me. It was there one ate lunch, played Ping-Pong (sometimes with a net, sometimes without, passed the time of day between and after classes, argued incessantly, and generally devoted oneself to solving the ultimate problems of the human race. The penultimate problems we figured could be left for our declining years, after we had graduated.

Now, it is a different world--not only at CUNY, but everywhere.  And I, for one, don't even have to head to the library to read magazines.  From the comfort of my home, I read this essay in Commentary and thanked my years of doodling away in the libraries at USC!  Joseph Epstein, who is now 78, writes about how the parent-child relationship has changed over the decades:

My father and I did not hug, we did not kiss, we did not say “I love you” to each other. This may seem strangely distant, even cold to a generation of huggers, sharers, and deep-dish carers. No deprivation was entailed here, please believe me. We didn’t have to do any of these things, my father and I. The fact was, I loved my father, and I knew he loved me.

I can relate to that.  It is almost like he is describing my childhood.

Epstein makes a good point when he writes about why things have changed from that old-school:

I have a suspicion that this cultural change began with the entrée into the language of the word parenting. I don’t know the exact year that the word parenting came into vogue, but my guess is that it arrived around the same time as the new full-court press, boots-on-the-ground-with-heavy-air-support notion of being a parent. To be a parent is a role; parenting implies a job.

So, what does that mean?

Under the regime of parenting, raising children became a top priority, an occupation before which all else must yield. The status of children inflated greatly.

I used to joke with the daughter that I couldn't wait for her to become an adult because I could then "snip, snip" those apron strings.  She knew I meant it, and she also knew that she would not let that happen--we live in a world that is far removed from those 1930s and 1940s.  I am an old soul trapped in a much younger body!

One can no longer be merely a parent; one must be—up and at ’em— relentlessly parenting.

A joy it is to read such essays, where the sentences and paragraphs seem so elegantly put together, and to convey simple but profound thoughts.  To think that I would not have known about such pleasures in life if I hadn't doodled away my time back then and now!

Oh, btw, this post itself was interrupted by a call from the daughter; I am, after all, a father in these parenting times! ;)