who is raising the ipad kids?
A touch over five years ago, something magnificent happened that, until just shy of a year before, I hadn’t ever given real consideration towards the possibility of: on a cold day in February, my first daughter was born. In a methodically unwelcoming hospital room in Georgetown, Texas, a then uninitiated Alexander was transformed from a layabout recently-recovered stoner suffering from prolonged adolescence into a real adult with some undeniably real responsibilities. It’s an impossible task to make anyone who hasn’t had the experience of such a transformation understand the day-in-day-out nose to the grindstone mentality that you have to adopt in order to successfully raise a child. You’ll have plenty of people who swear that they get it because they have a puppy or something, but anyone with more than a handful of functioning brain cells can make the assessment that this is a false equivalence. There were days that my former partner and I were truly made to reckon with the gravity of our decision to start a family by way of every aspect of our lives increasing dramatically in its level of difficulty. If anyone without prior experience with infants can happily imagine themselves waking up four to seven times every night for diaper changes, feedings, and paranoia-induced sporadic crib checks to make sure your kid is still breathing to then get out of bed and get two sips into your morning coffee before the nine pound behemoth that caused the need for caffeine that you were attempting to satiate in the first place started crying, you’re out of your fucking mind as far as I’m concerned.
That said, I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. Despite the fact that mine and my former partner’s respective mental healths were deteriorating to an all-time-low, there was an indescribable beauty in the madness that we were collectively experiencing. Just as we were starting to catch a rhythm, a mere fourteen months later, my child’s mother and I were rewarded for our tireless work in the field of child-rearing with an opportunity to raise the proverbial difficulty level of our lives with - you guessed it - another daughter.
To any curious party, I’ll give you a little tidbit that we learned: having a second child does not make the experience of being a parent twice as hard because having two children is *exponentially* harder than having just one. The difficulties and hardships we would face would soon inspire me to get a vasectomy in what I could later call a preemptive protest to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but at the time was just insurance that I would never again do anything to continue spreading myself too thin to be an adequate father to the children I already had. Over the course of the years that would follow, we learned a lot about parenting and about each other which would eventually culminate into the two of us separating and starting from square one as we figured out how to coparent.
I’m happy to say that the two of us are now successfully divorced people who still love each other platonically and have a beautiful relationship that is the polar opposite of what I saw in the divorce and subsequent custody litigation that my parents put my siblings and I through which ultimately led to my estrangement from both of them. I’m immensely proud of us for doing what we did and always prioritizing our childrens’ happiness and wellbeing and, this month, we’ll be seeing both of our daughters off to school for the first time. The sheer terror that my former partner as well as both of our partners are experiencing as we prepare to watch our little bundles of joy begin to spread their wings a little is unlike any sort of fear that my fear and paranoia-prone brain has ever come across.
But you can’t control what you can’t control, right? I’ve long (hypocritically) maintained that there’s no sense in losing your head about the things that you have no power to change. In a world so pervasively damaged by the principal-agent problem, however, it’s very difficult to submit to the countless situations in which you’re not calling the shots. Frankly, sometimes I find it preferable to learn from the noble ostrich and just stick my head in the sand rather than torture myself over my lack of agency. So in that spirit, my childrens’ mother is now turning to another train of thought: what is she going to do with all of this free time while they’re in school? What will navigating the world child-free feel like? I’ve had a better perspective on this over the last couple of years since, post-divorce, my children’s mother is the primary custodian of the children which has left me able to continue working overtime, but also have more free time during the day before I go to work to navigate the world perceived as something I never had the chance to be: a fully functioning, childless adult. Please don’t read any regret into those words; I love my children with everything that I have and I would give just about anything to be able to switch places with their mother and have them full-time instead, but that’s just not the reality at this juncture.
The aforesaid time I’ve spent looking from the outside in for once has been…enlightening. I’ve never been so justifiably put off by the behavior of parents than I have been since spending time in an area far less frequented by children than my previous dwelling of the family-friendly Round Rock, Texas. While I do understand to an extent some of the frustrations that parents in the city center experience not being catered to whatsoever, it is very difficult to deny that a lot of these frustrations come from the simple fact that parents are infuriatingly adamant about protecting their children from the real world to the point of not allowing them to integrate into it. If there is a single thought that could summarize the ideology that has guided the way my children have been raised, it is that, as a parent, it is not your job to coddle children so much as it is to teach your children how to be good adults and you should treat them as such. I’m far from the world’s foremost expert on how to raise children and I have not yet seen proof of concept in my efforts, but I do know one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt: my children know how to sit politely at a dinner table with adults, try anything that’s put in front of them at least once, and engage with adults who may speak to them without a fucking iPad in front of them better than most kids I encounter on my escapades about town.
I’m all for letting kids be kids, but that simply cannot be allowed to detract from the end goal of making sure the future generations are polite and well-adjusted to the various trials of adulthood that they will inevitably face. Take the iPad thing for example; does nobody else see a problem with just setting your child in front of a screen every time they go to a restaurant? Would we think it socially acceptable for a grown adult to exhibit this same behavior? What do we think of the grown adults who pull out their phone to watch a sports game of some sort at the dinner table? Do we look upon them favorably? I’m well aware that some developmentally-challenged kids/kids with learning disabilities get a bit of an exception with this because these modern conveniences provide relief for parents that need relief in whatever capacity that they’re able to get their hands on it, but let’s not pretend that these kids make up more than an infinitesimal sector of the children plugged into a screen you see out in public. Like it or not, parenting is a job that you have to be committed to a hundred percent of the time and that includes taking advantage of putting your children in social settings and setting an example for them as to how they should be conducting themselves. I shudder to think of how well-adjusted these kids have the capability of being after subjugation to such attention and effort starvation as this.
Sadly, this isn’t an isolated example and, as someone who works with the public for a living, I’m regularly tasked with tackling these behaviors. From parents who would rather argue with their restaurant servers about the fact that a $100 a person restaurant doesn’t have a robust kids menu as opposed to doing the work to make their children expand their horizons to parents who would let their children literally run around a bustling restaurant instead of deprive themselves of their own comfort, there are countless examples to account for that show sacrifice as a value parents are widely losing touch with. We can’t blame the kids for their parents’ fear of challenging themselves, but eventually, these children will walk amongst us as members of society. Where do we draw the line of judging adults who watch football games on their phone while eating dinner with their family between a child who was deprived of an earnest effort in being taught the subtle art of socialization and an adult who never recognized that they’re displaying socially unacceptable behavior?
Those questions are above my pay grade. Frankly, I’m a person who’s prone to making snap judgements about people in the first place so perhaps the answer is just to shut up and not lament about issues that won’t have any true bearing on my own life. That said, I can’t help but wonder how these behaviors may manifest themselves into other areas of social ineptitude. Obviously I don’t have any way of knowing this to be true, but I suspect that being deprived of opportunities to interact with others in your developmental years will rear its head in some way that will be more difficult for me than the act of rolling my eyes when I see parents at the table next to me plugging their kids in so that they can enjoy their wine without the burden of raising their children.
Like these parents, I also possess fear regarding my children, but unlike them, I’m not afraid of having to acclimate my children to the world in potentially difficult settings so much as I fear what kind of a world and its inhabitants that previous generations are setting them up to grow up with. The same reasons that I’m afraid to send my children to school (well, there are other reasons too) also motivate me to engage with them more thoroughly when I do have the opportunity to teach them what I know about the world by way of experiences and conversations. I imagine that in less than a year, I’ll have to explain to my daughters what TikTok is because some brilliant mind will have thought it beneficial to put an iPhone in the hands of some other kindergartener they go to school with. It’s not telling them that they’re not getting smartphones until they’re teenagers that I’m dreading so much as I’m apprehensive about how adept I’ll be at drawing the line between sheltering them from the bad habits that my peers have normalized with their children and giving them the space to figure these things out on their own.
In general, I think that fear is an effective, but ultimately unhealthy motivator for just about anything. My children mean the world to me and I’m sure that even the parents who I’ve been lambasting here would share the same sentiment. It is because I love them so much that I’m not going to let my fears about the world become obstacles for my children to move through as they grow up and I would encourage other parents to not let their fear of being challenged by their children’s behavior become the reason why they take the easy way out when it comes to raising them.
I don’t expect to change anyone’s parenting philosophies. If you’re already an iPad parent who lets their kids eat chicken nuggets for every meal, I probably haven’t changed your mind about this behavior, but in the off chance that I did you more than likely wouldn’t even know where to begin making a course correction and I can’t really help you rip that bandaid off. That said, if you’re currently childless but expecting a child in your life at some point, I would plead with you to not take the path of least resistance and to instead invest your time and energy into making sure that your kid grows up to be someone you would want to hang out with rather than just some appendage that you’re dragging around. I was fortunate enough to have adopted this mindset when my children were still young enough so that I can now take my girls to a daddy-daughter date at the bar top of Odd Duck when I have the resources to splurge and have them eat ceviche, falafel, and quail without complaint or distractions. I want a world in which children aren’t burdens to a young parent’s attempts to be young but rather a part of it that can supplement an already enriching experience byway of creating memories. I want my daughters to have great meals, be able to hold conversations with my friends, and enjoy a leisurely walk without the constant need for outside stimulus. Moreover, I want them to grow up and have their lives benefit from having been socially adept as long as they can remember.
Isn’t that what we all want?
