Remember the times when you were young
and your family went to the home of another family to share a meal?
Remember how you and the other children dutifully sat at the table
only as long as you were required, and when finally dismissed you
burst away to play?
Maybe you went upstairs, downstairs, or
outside – anywhere that you could play alone together. What did you
do? Maybe you played dress-up, hide-and-seek, kick-the-can, soccer or
baseball. Maybe you drew pictures, or romped in the snow or water.
You laughed and you no doubt got into arguments. You gathered
bouquets and ladybugs, maybe dug up clay and made pots. You showed
each other secret places and cool stuff in the house. You looked at
books and played board games, you brushed each other’s hair.
Sometimes you might have done naughty things: pour paints into the
wagon to make soup, open all the band-aids. You lost track of time,
you sunk your self into life, and you played.
Now consider what happens these days
when you get together in groups with other people. What do the kids
most always do? They sit in front of a screen. No matter how you cut
it, this is not play. Those children are being robbed of their
playtime by the adults who allow and even encourage it.
Oh yes, you may feel that the screen
time you grant them is only for special material that you or friends
have selected with care. It might be non-violent, or a goofy favorite
from your own childhood, or a Disney movie, which somehow is always
accepted as fine fare for young minds. It might even be a fascinating
documentary; for we consider ourselves smart and cool, and we fancy
that the movies we choose are good for the kids, distinct from
the trash that others might show.
You already know that there’s a world
of difference between kids playing together and kids sitting
passively (or even actively, as in the case of video games) in front
of a screen. You already know that kids’ time to play together is
essential for their development into mature and whole adults. So
guard it! Protect the children’s time to play together. They can’t
do it for themselves. You can’t do it yesterday or tomorrow – you
have to do it now. If you wait until tomorrow, you’ll see how
quickly that turns into never, how all of a sudden the children are
grown and you’ve lost your chance to give them time to play
together.
Do you think it’s already too
late—that they already have lost the imagination and creativity
that is inherent in all children? Trust them. Give them time and
space. Whether you are a parent or another adult friend of children,
you can use your power for good: wherever children come together, say
“no” to technology of all kinds. Watch out—now that they’re
used to it, they might try to talk you into a movie as a reward for
spending an hour not watching a movie! For all too quickly they have
become skilled at negotiating for this vice that they now feel is
their birthright.
We didn’t mean to do this. All of
this technology is still very new, and we are just beginning to learn
how to use it without letting it use us. We will make mistakes. We
will forgive ourselves and start anew.
Children need to live out their
wholeness in order to believe in it. They need to discover that they
can entertain themselves, that they can communicate and play with
their friends. While they’re at it they will build happy memories
of a place and people, and then take their turn at protecting and
preserving it. This is part of our ancestral tradition of raising
community-builders and caring citizens.
Some generation of adults is going to
have to reclaim and protect children’s playtime, and I propose it
be yours. See if you can get a clean start in your circle of friends
by beginning now with a collective ban on electronic
entertainment where children are gathered. Remove it from your group
culture. Start with your own home. Be brave. Know that your radical
action is part of the preservation of the best of human possibility:
to create, to relate, to cooperate, to imagine. To play.
Thank you Liz!
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