Children and Phones

WARNING: “Screen will not stop child from falling out window.”

There are also Baby on Board signs, strict laws regulating how children are to be strapped into vehicles, legal mandates of attendance to education, court intervention should a child go malnourished, and a great number of agencies set in place to protect that child from abuse. It would seem that we care a great deal about our children.

And yet, as they age it becomes more and more difficult to care for them. Even before having to endure the excruciating sufferings of teenage years, with all of its thrashing in the hormonal whitewaters of maturation, something else will happen to them as they are coming of age, something unique to their age and yet as treacherous as any war faced by previous generations: they will be given a phone.

It’s actually a poor name for the thing, because, as comedian Gary Gulman says, “The phone is just a seldom-used app on my phone.” It’s more of a media machine. Or, more accurately still, a black mirror that can become any number of things at any time. Nevertheless, call it what you will, the thing has changed the family dynamic in a big way.

Our children are now dying of a different kind of Consumption. They are drowning in the sheer amount of content available to them. As a result, the anthems of a culture preaching vengeance and retribution, stoking the flames of resentment in their already tumultuous experience of life’s hardships, are constantly playing in their minds, accompanied by images of the degradation of the human person. Some become addicted to pornography and all of them to the sensation of the infinite scroll. They are exhausted and irritable, and, like all addicts, are losing their memory as they look for the next hit.

And still, even as this is common knowledge, instead of protecting our children from this vice that steals them from their own humanity, we deliver them into the hands of this technology designed to enslave them, before abandoning them to college professors, whom we pay, and who are themselves disoriented by the same vice, who indoctrinate them with modernity’s dogmas, which serve only to protect the status quo.

At best, our children are raising themselves, with no more interest in television than they have in the advice of an adult, not because they are contrarian or bad, but because they are already full from the constant “instruction” they get from their peers and influencers. They literally live in a different world, the world on the other side of the screen. And perhaps we mean well by giving phones to our children, hoping it will keep them in our world, enabling us to track their every move and keep them safe, but the screen will not stop children from falling out of the window. +