Sometimes I
walk along the canal by our home and greet our elderly neighbours, and maybe
stop for a cup of tea. As I’ve mentioned, most of them grew up without
electricity or cars, in a time when life revolved around the family and the
church, so they provide a window to a culture and world-view that all our
forebears knew well but few of us can imagine. While more and more of Ireland
now looks like suburban London or Chicago -- traffic jams, office complexes and
internet pop culture -- some of my neighbours still walk along the country road
to their garden plots, tend horses or cows in the nearby field, or ride their
bicycles to church, an image of a bygone age. And when I ask them what has
changed most in the area, I get a common answer: the absence of children.
They don’t
mean that no one has children anymore – of course there are many families in
the area, and they love the occasional visits from their relatives. They mean
that when they dig their potatoes or walk their horse down the lane, no neighbourhood
children tag along behind them, as they followed their elder neighbours. They
rarely are pestered by six-year-olds with questions, nor do they see local
urchins in the branches of trees or bicycling down the country road. All
through the modern world, the story is much the same – when I listen to elderly
people in Missouri or London talk about their childhoods, they too played along
the road and followed relatives and neighbours. Now, they look out their window
and see empty streets.
Such an
absence severs a cord of learning and lore that might have stretched back as
far as there were people. The old man down the road still grows his own
vegetables and fixes his own tools, and I suspect he feels, and is, freer and
more self-reliant at 86 than most modern people, confined to desks, feel at 16
or 26 or 36. He knows how to do these things because he grew up with such
habits, watching his elders.
At an age
when we soak up the world before we understand it, their routines – sowing on
St. Patrick’s, harvesting at Halloween, pruning in winter or gathering in
autumn – became as familiar as breathing. Sometimes elders put children to work
clearing cabbages of caterpillars or shooing the chickens away from the herbs.
Sometimes, as the elders pushed a barrow of vegetables at harvest, small
children waddled behind carrying a turnip or rutabaga in their arms, proud of their
work. Other times, I suspect, they were just in the way, and the adults wearied
of answering all their questions, but the children watched and learned.
Often, of
course, children around here had their own agenda, ambling across fields and
mountains, bogs and woodlands. They searched through the underbrush for snails
and millipedes, found hibernating hedgehogs, or tramped paths through the
countryside in pursuit of pirates or dragons.
That was
also time well spent. Classic children’s games – whether hunting tribes in the
Amazon or 1950s children playing pickup in the sandlot – force children to get
along, stand up for themselves, negotiate the rules, compromise, take turns and
accommodate everyone. Keeping track of such complex relationships seems to be
the main reason we have larger brains than other primates; the larger the
social group, the larger the brain, and we have the biggest of both.
As Neil
Postman notes three decades ago, “Like distinctive forms of dress, children’s
games, once so visible on the streets of our towns and cities, are also
disappearing. Even the idea of a children’s game seems to be slipping from
our grasp … Who has seen anyone over the age of nine playing Jacks, Johnny
on the Pony, Blindman’s Bluff, or ball-bouncing rhymes? Peter and Iona Opie,
the great English historians of children’s games, have identified hundreds of
traditional children’s games, almost none of which are presently played with
any regularity by American children. Even Hide-and-Seek, which was played
in Periclean Athens more than two thousand years ago, has now almost completely
disappeared from the repertoire of self-organized children’s amusements.
Children’s games, in a phrase, are an endangered species.” And he wrote this
before the internet.
Of course,
some children inevitably got into mischief; I have on my shelf a 19th-century
garden book that lists among the many garden pests, between boll weevils and
butterflies, “boys.” If your garden has an infestation of boys, it notes drily,
some aggressive dogs might be just the thing.
At the end
of the day, my neighbours tell me, they often had friends over to play music or
tell stories to the children, the same stories they had heard generations
before.
Today, though, they see few children in the fields or on the
roads, climbing their apple trees or straddling their fences. They see their
grandchildren on holidays, they tell me, but the children are often staring at
electronic devices, spending their formative years learning to treat electrons
on a screen as reality. My old neighbours, who learned to be self-reliant
adults by being children, are among the last of their kind; no children follow
or imitate them, nor do many hear the stories they pass on.
Instead,
most children these days grow up staring at portals to the worst humanity has
to offer, often seeing at young ages images that few adults ever saw in their
lives. Of course, children have always been curious – remember the scene in Tom
Sawyer when Becky was peeking at a nude picture in the teacher’s medical book.
That was a single image, however, seen with difficulty, and far cruder images
are a few clicks away for children today.
Growing up
with the internet has other ramifications. It means that they grow up with pop
culture rather than local culture, the same as children in Texas or Ukraine. It
means they grow up unmonitored by parents but their curiosities and weaknesses
tracked by corporations as they grow to adulthood.
Over the same decades that children’s play declined, family
time declined, television use skyrocketed and internet use went from zero to
frightening, childhood mental disorders have also increased. “It’s not just
that we’re seeing disorders that we overlooked before. Clinical questionnaires
aimed at assessing anxiety and depression, for example, have been given in
unchanged form to normative groups of schoolchildren in the US ever since the
1950s.” In that time depression increased five to eight times, the suicide rate
for young people aged 15 to 24 has doubled, and that for children under 15 has
quadrupled.
Empathy in children has declined and narcissism has
increased, “exactly what we would expect to see in children who have little
opportunity to play socially,” wrote Peter Gray in Aeon magazine a few years
ago. “Children can’t learn these social skills and values in school, because
school is an authoritarian, not a democratic setting. School fosters
competition, not co-operation; and children there are not free to quit when
others fail to respect their needs and wishes.”
I wish I could say that my own daughter stands entirely
apart from this trend, that I completely avoid the trends I bemoan. I don’t
entirely, and for that reason I can sympathize with any parent standing against
the world yelling stop. Her friends and relatives give her electronic devices
and video games, her mates play them at their houses, girls at the local
village school talk about slasher movies and Hollywood celebrities.
In many indicators of community – the kind Robert Putnam
made famous in Bowling Alone – Ireland does better than my native USA, but it’s
changing quickly, and I don’t know how much it will change in the years ahead. Moving
out here doesn’t mean entering a Brigadoon outside of time, where pop culture
doesn’t happen. I try to raise an old-fashioned kid, but it’s like organising a
carpool or a bridge game, or any other ritual of generations past – it doesn’t
work if you’re the only one doing it.
So I have to compromise, set limits and pick battles, the
same as any parent of an adolescent. She’s not allowed to see Youtube, but she
can watch certain television programmes; she has no social media accounts, but plays
an occasional video game – and then I tell her to read a book, or ride your bike,
or go exploring in the bog.
Over our home-schooling lessons we talk about the things I
write about; she agrees with some and respectfully argues with me on the rest,
and I’m grateful for all those outcomes. I accept that her tastes will
radically differ from mine, and told her I will only forbid things based on
substance, not style. While she loves certain bands with a teenager’s passion,
she also goes with me to the opera; she saw the Star Wars film tonight, but also
sees Shakespeare and Hitchcock with me. She rides her bike a few miles to
school, mows the lawn and can ride a horse, shoot a bow and skin an animal, but
is also normal enough to communicate with her peers, and I can be content with
that.
Occasionally, she stops on her bike and talks to one of our elderly
neighbours, wheeling soil to his garden. A teenaged girl and an elderly farmer
aren’t natural confidantes, but she listens to his stories and tells me about
it later.
“He said he was really happy to see a child,” she said
once.
I bet he was, I said.
4 comments:
Brian, what a well written, deeply introspective post. It is essay material and should be submitted to the literary magazine of your choice. I have four children,\ and four grandchildren and when the GK's visit we limit the screen time. The 9 year old visits often, the 12 year old less because her mother tells me "you won't let her do what she wants to do." She says this as if It's a bad thing that her child cannot control her entire day as she wishes and it saddens me. But the last time the 12 year old visited we had an ice storm and she and I were stuck in a car for an hour and her electronic device lost power. The conversation that evolved was wonderful and natural. The next weekend she asked to sleep over here on our Poor Farm and we spent hours outside. It's a process, one generation keeping the next as grounded in reality and people, rather than money and things, but a process well worth the effort.Happy Christmas to you, and your fortunate to have you, daughter.
Donna,
Thank you -- I'm glad you liked it. I've heard a number of people reminisce fondly about the times their power went out, and how that was one of the best family times of their life. Happy Christmas to you as well!
Another aspect of the digital retreat from face to face community and the real world is the disconnect from nature itself. As described by the book "Last Child in the Woods", a malaise and health decline in the next generation seems linked to separation from nature. And let's not forget that these kids will be future voters and deciders on policy regarding the environment they know so little about.
Umm, Merry Christmas, and keep doing what you're doing. It does make a difference, and who knows when a tripping point will happen, and voices like yours will resonate and move the wider world.
Steve,
I've read segments of Louv's book, and would love to read the rest. Thanks for the words of encouragement -- it means a lot to me.
Merry Christmas.
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