**Warning** this blog post was not written by an old lady – it just sounds that way. If you don’t like old ladies, then don’t read this.
The other day I sat with a new friend of mine. Let’s just say his name is Ryan. He is six years old, and all school year, many of us thought he wasn’t learning much of anything. But let me tell you, my new friend has learned something, and it’s something we all need to think about.
I brought him into my little speech therapy office and showed him three laminated pictures. I wanted him to look at these three pictures and discover a way to link them together somehow, to give his vocabulary more meaning, and to organize his thinking. The pictures I showed him were of a stool, a living room couch and a park bench. Many kids are immediately able to identify the most salient feature that links these objects, that being the fact that you can sit on all of them. But this was difficult for Ryan, and he looked at me with his big brown eyes, worried that he would fail. So I pointed to the stool, “You sit on a stool”. Then I asked him “what is a couch for?” He quickly told me “you sit on a couch to watch movies or to watch T.V.” I smiled, “That’s great Ryan, you sit on a stool, AND you sit on a couch! Now, what is a bench for?” Ryan did not hesitate with his answer. “A bench is where you sit to look at your phone or to look at your tablet”.
I wasn’t sure what to say. It wasn’t that he was wrong; it was that he was right. This little kindergartener, who cannot tell me any letter sounds, knows enough to tell me that a park bench is where you go to look at a phone. It is NOT where you go to watch your children play, or to read a book. It is not where you go to observe the subtle changes of the world around you. No, you sit on a bench so you can look at a screen.
When I was little, no one looked at anything as much as we all look at our phones, computers and iPads these days. If my dad was at his desk, I knew he was doing paperwork, or studying for a test. I understood that he was doing something important, that required his brain. If my mom was looking at a book, I understood that she was reading and learning something, and when someone looked at me, I knew they were looking at me, and listening to me. They were almost never looking at me through a lens finder or glancing up at me from an obscure plastic device. What do our kids think we are doing when we are constantly half attending to their world? Do they know that when we look at our phones we are having conversations with friends? Do they understand that we are reading the news and scrolling through Facebook? What must they think and feel about this? And then, we wonder why in the world “kids these days” don’t know how to have a conversation, or make appropriate eye contact. We wonder why they don’t they want to go outside or read a book? We wonder why families aren’t having conversations, and why no one seems to understand each other.
I don’t think kids really understand why they should read a book, or that there is something magical about just sitting on a park bench and watching the world go by. But, why in the world would they? How often do they see adults do these things?
I realize that technology is wonderful, and I love my phone. I mean, I really really love my phone. I never actually call anyone; so technically, I love my “Internet/Facebook device”. But, this is what I’m learning about my internet device and the real world that is being shut out because of it. It’s fine for the world to change, and that’s all swell, but one very important thing will always stay the same. Our kids will become the kind of people they see, not the kind of people we tell them to be. So, I guess the question is, who do you want to be for you children? Who do you want your children to be? Do you want them to be the kind of people who sleep with their phone or sleep with….wait.. I mean, do you want them to be absorbed in their phones, or absorbed in the big beautiful world around them? Remember, it’s really, very much, up to us.
