Can this generation achieve the virtue of being bored? Busy school days, after-school, sports, cultural experiences such as art and music education, all to keep children busy – to keep them ‘off the streets’, even though it is a slightly protected life here in Denmark. We know who we are.
The disorder
Come home. Homework. Dinner. Playing time. Favorite YouTuber / TikToker / Instagrammer / anime. Not necessarily in that order. Raise your hand if this sounds familiar!
Stay up late, the device tucked under the pillow, from where it casts a glow on your child’s face as you peek in around 6 p.m. 23.00. This heralds a sour breakfast, low-learning day and fear of conflict with media junkies: our children.
Downtime is no longer downtime. Our brains are on autopilot until we get lucky with the yawning gap. We struggle with the yawn until it wins and pulls our overused machine to sleep.
The addiction
We are busy. With apps. In fact, there are even apps – the methadone of the media – designed to shut down other apps to help our kids get out of the habit and get enriched by all the things they are not very interested in. But at what price?
During the initial withdrawal phases, we are forced to interact with them. Practice! Why do we have to stop bingeing that series, or stop our mindless games and get off the hamster wheel that keeps our wheels going? No scrolling, tweeting or binging for us.
Is modeling healthy habits fun for us? Is it fun to go to the gym, especially when you are in terrible shape? Is there family therapy or a 12-step program for all of us? This is the ice cream we forbid our children to eat on a regular basis. The same ice cream that we pull from the freezer while they sleep?
Recipes
Who remembers hours of TV? Walling in front [pre-you] tube? Were we okay? We also played outside, of our choice. We came up with amazing ideas of boredom. Some of us did not finish our homework because we were either busy socializing, creating, or procrastinating, but we were not slaves to the media. Or were we?
Maybe it’s time for extensive work to be done in schools in collaboration with parents to create an equally potent monster to fight these media giants? How effective are children in learning, acquiring and retaining knowledge and problem solving?
In Denmark, we are lucky with a national curriculum where there is room to meet the challenges posed by the latest forms of technology.
But it requires conviction
How can we protect our children and ourselves from this monster? Can we try? How much time do we have on this planet at all? Perhaps we are too busy bingeing to notice the frightening changes that the impending effluvium brings.
Do we continue to ‘hunt the dragon’ and rationalize how technology is a beast that has grown at an exponentially fast pace, and who are we to stand in the way of that? If you can not beat them, then we just succumb to the collective ‘crack pipe’ and enjoy the ride with our kids?
Or are you ready to face these challenges? If so, what would you do?
Source: The Nordic Page