Get On Team Kid

Absolutely everyone should want to live in a pro-child world.

A new Harris poll has uncovered the astounding truth that kids want to play outside. I’m tempted to file this under “yet more things you didn’t need numbers to tell you.” But it’s actually helpful to hear from kids directly that being addicted to screens makes them unhappy, and they’d like some help kicking the habit from grown-ups.

One way we can all support them, even those of us who aren’t ourselves parents, is by making it easier for kids to play unsupervised. If we want them to go out “into the real world,” we have to welcome them when they get there. That means tolerating the noise they make in public places, keeping an eye out for them around the neighborhood, voting and working to keep crime low. It means just generally living in a society, the cost of perpetuating which is children, whether you yourself like or want them or not. You can’t shame kids for being mired in the online world while also making the physical world uninhabitable for them.

If you do, they’ll just keep scrolling. “Kids will always have more spare hours than adults can supervise—a gap that devices now fill,” write the authors of the study in The Atlantic. “‘Go outside’ has been quietly replaced with ‘Go online.’” I speak to my fellow childless cat people when I say that I suspect we bear part of the blame for this as well.

It mystifies me when I see people complaining that their old friends’ “social lives are now virtually non-existent” after having kids. If only there was some way to fix that by proactively seeking new parents out. If only they had people who cared about them to bring by home-cooked meals, help with child-care, offer emotional support—oh wait, that’s you, their childless friend. It’s on us to meet our friends with kids where they are, not on them to get a babysitter for the rave.

One author of the Harris survey is Jonathan Haidt, whose book The Anxious Generation has convinced a lot of people that there really is something wrong with letting kids bathe in a lake of digital slop for hours each day. I confess that Haidt’s thesis is one of those things I didn’t need data to know. But if data is what it takes to make people get serious about this obviously existential crisis, so be it. And Haidt does make one very sharp point that I think is worth highlighting:

America and many other Western nations made two contradictory choices about children’s safety, and both were wrong. We decided that the real world was so full of dangers that children should not be allowed to explore it without adult supervision…. At the same time, it seemed like too much of a bother to design and require age-appropriate guardrails for kids online.

I’d add to this that, on the academic front, we often coupled constant surveillance of children with total neglect for their formation. We structured their days rigidly, but shrank from disciplining them. We monitored them constantly but gave them no guidance on what to read.

I’ve noticed that my students are sick not just of scrolling outside the classroom, but also of wandering aimlessly inside the classroom. These two problems are actually the same kind of problem, in that fixing them requires an activation energy that has to come from outside before it can come from within. Especially when you’re young, you actually need—crave—someone who knows things to tell you what to do. It’s not satisfying to just follow your heart; you want to follow a person, who knows things, through a list of books and exercises that will make you better.

It’s old-fashioned, I know. But that’s because it’s human nature. One of Aristotle’s best observations is that you aren’t born naturally inclined to make the choices that will make you happiest. It’s one of the things you have to learn by doing, which means accepting a little bit of benevolent coercion at first. Education is soul formation, and “learning comes with pain”—until the things that are good for you also start to feel good. Like fine wine and exercise, virtue is an acquired taste.

The point that learning hurts is from the Politics, because—another brilliant point of Aristotle’s—the souls formed in school are the ones that grow up to vote and run things. That means it’s in absolutely everyone’s best interest to pitch in with the project of hoisting future generations out of the digital mire, in every way we can.

The people currently rotting their brains with Tung Tung Sahur videos are going to be running the world before we’re done here. Whether we help them or hurt them, it’s us who’ll pay the price or reap the benefits. Another reason why all of us grown-ups, if we prefer not to live in an anarchic hellscape, should be on team kid.