What Are Parents (and Big Tech) Doing to Their Children?
The supermarket checkout now follows kids everywhere, and the 'seduction' is only getting more intense.
We have watched as the scene plays out in front of us in supermarkets throughout the world. As if working independently of the brain, a child’s hands race back and forth over the junk sold near the cash register. Parents fight the battle. “No,” echoes through the supermarket — “Pleaaaasse” — and finally the explosion. Sometimes the parent explodes — “I said NOOOO (eyes bulging)” — or the child loses his marbles and falls to the floor for the classic tantrum.
Fortunately, my son has never had that tantrum, but he does whittle away at our patience when requesting all kinds of junk that he usually would never ask for. Marketers, however, have spent hours figuring out how and what to place in that crowded space between checkout lines. The gauntlet is brutal, but if you can make it to where you are packing your purchases, the child’s attention usually shifts from that crap to other things. Maybe he will plot a new, more effective strategy for the next time. My son learned that if he didn’t ask for anything, he stood a better chance of being rewarded with some random item. On the occasions I don’t pick something up for him, he reminds me that he didn’t ask for anything.
Because he’s my son, I will tell you he is one of the best (of course, I am biased). Nonetheless, my wife and I have been waging a battle against the unrelenting pressure of the “24/7 digital checkout line.” Social media, YouTube, online gaming, and an entire Blockbuster store of movies and cartoons at the child’s fingertips haunt every parent like a bad smell. At first, my mother-in-law would tantalize our son with her smartphone whenever she didn’t know how to entertain him or when he was eating. We fought it, and even though she did her best to do what she felt was not harmful to him, we won. She stopped but always with the comment, “Your mommy and daddy don’t like that.”
All of us had our shows as kids. My son has his shows, and we don’t deny him that joy. My wife, regrettably, turned my son onto computer games when I was traveling last year — she is from a younger generation that regards being digitally tethered as a natural phase of evolution — but after a period of what I feared was turning into an obsession with one game, I have noticed he managed the “immediate rush of joy” quite well. The foundation for receiving dopamine fixes thanks to his online reality had never been laid, so for him, swimming into the vastness of that digital chasm had no lure. He would play for 10 or 15 minutes and be done. Then, he would return to his Lego, Brio, or drums, and, voila, a typical kid again.
Not so typical
The thing is, our son is not so typical. When we go to restaurants, he brings some Legos or other toys — a travel connect four game that engages waiters, other patrons, and him throughout the meal. When we go out with other families, the parents marvel (this article is not about my son, please forgive me) at how our son is so capable of entertaining himself. He is constantly engaging the world around himself. The other children, void of their gadgets — it seems other parents don’t want to toss their kids those digital lifelines when with us — slip into whining mode.
“Mom, I’m bored. Mommmmmm, I’M BORED! Mommmmmm, can I watch something. Mommmmm, can I play that game?”
Embarrassed, “mom” tells the child to engage our son. Our son will offer a page from his notebook and some pencils or slides across some Legos and can usually entertain them for a bit. Still, the addiction to that limitless world of digital seduction lies just one screaming fit away. Our son engages the other adults in conversations on topics that are interesting — he is seven — while the other children are even incapable of engaging him on topics closer to home like “hide ‘n seek.”
Most of the children are void of imagination. When they come to us for playdates, it is like they have gone to another planet. Nonetheless, the children leave our house mentally drained because they are playing using their imaginations. We have had incidents where kids come to play and eventually demand digital satisfaction. They have exploded into tears when told that they can’t go off and play games alone in the corner.
Again, this is not an article about our parenting practices. It is an article about the inability of too many children to communicate simple ideas because they are hooked emotionally, intellectually, and developmentally on their digital worlds — whatever those worlds may be. I always try to speak to the children who visit, but they don’t know how to engage adults. The poor little kids are tolerating the “dip” into reality and counting the minutes when they can dive back into their secure digital ponds.
Many parents ask us, “How do you keep him off all the gadgets?” I don’t understand this question. It’s not like the gadgets have legs and brains. It’s not like smartphones hand themselves to crying, cranky children. Parents are the dealers, and the digital drugs they are plying their children are saturating their developing intellects with indescribable needs, and Big Tech is more than happy to accommodate.
It was the TikTok-infamous “Blackout Challenge” that killed 10-year-old Nylah Anderson, according to her mom. In December 2021, Philadelphia-area resident Tawainna Anderson discovered her daughter’s lifeless body on the bedroom floor, following the “active, happy, healthy, and incredibly intelligent” girl’s attempt to complete the challenge, in which users of the world’s second most popular non-gaming app choked themselves with belts, towels, or other objects until they passed out. Nylah was rushed to the hospital, where she died five days later.
Over an 18-month span between 2021 and 2022, the Blackout Challenge was said to have killed 20 children in 18 months, 15 of them under the age of 12. And it’s hardly the only dangerous “challenge” to go viral. The “Skullbreaker Challenge,” which involves kicking a person’s legs out from under them as they jump into the air, nearly paralyzed a 13-year-old Pennsylvania girl, and has led to criminal charges in at least one instance. The so-called Angel of Death Challenge, a “game” in which participants jump in front of moving vehicles to see if they’ll stop in time, has reportedly led to multiple deaths. And when a 12-year-old Arizona boy attempted the TikTok “Fire Challenge,” where youngsters record themselves igniting blazes at home, he landed in the ICU and has undergone multiple surgeries since (A 10-Year-Old Died During Viral Blackout Challenge).
We glean a lot of good from our digital experiences daily. Unfortunately, too many parents are not paying attention to the deadening effects of children being constantly online. Schools in Los Angeles are not banning the use of phones during the school day. The phones must be locked in lockers or handed over to the school administrators each morning. Some parents, many of who grew up without phones, complain that they should have access to their children anytime they want and that taking the phones is against their “1st Amendment” rights — those addicted parents should use their phones to learn about the Constitution, by the way, and spend less time liking others photos.
Mark Zuckerberg came out this week and apologized to one of the dumbest men in Congress, Jim Jordan. He said that the Biden administration had forced Facebook to “censor” information about COVID. Conservatives and MAGidiots call Facebook’s warnings about right-wing conspiracy theories about COVID censorship. Zuckerberg promised he wouldn’t make that censorship mistake in the future — in other words, he would be joining his dopey pal, Elon Musk, and using his social media holdings for the sharing of lies and propaganda.
And into this digital swamp, children as young as one enter, and then we ask questions like, “What the hell is going on? Why is the world so f***** up?”