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Who raises your children?

Op-ed: Study showing that Israeli kids lead world in Internet usage means we are failing as parents

Where are your children right now? At this very moment?

 

No, you’re wrong. No, they’re not there either, or here. Do you give up? Great. Here is the only answer that will always be right: They are in front of a screen. In front of the television. In front of the iPhone. In front of the computer. They are always there. Why are they there? Because that’s where you left them the last time.

 

Which last time? The last time you gave up, with unbearable ease, on being parents. The last time you told yourselves – even without telling yourselves – that kids are a bother and that they should leave you alone.

 

Whose children are they, for heaven’s sake? Channel 2’s children? The children of TV shows like Survivor? Facebook’s kids? Don’t bother answering because you already replied: You replied positively. They have been the children of all of the above for a while now, and for a while now they are not really yours.

 

Television raises them four hours a day, and the Internet raises them another four hours a day. And how much time do you in fact spend raising them? Twenty minutes a day in total? Fifty minutes? Wow, you are much less significant in their lives than their real parents – the virtual parents they never sought, the alternate parents you gave them because you (and there is no explanation or excuse for this) are negligent parents, who never intended to work at it.

 

And by the way, being parents is nothing else but that: It’s work.

 

Blessed passivity

There is no intention to preach here (actually, there is,) but Israelis bring children to the world the same way they wear flip-flops: It’s convenient, required, accepted, and there is no reason to think about it too much. Later they find out that it makes noise, that it’s not going anywhere, that it requires constant investment, and that in fact they have no idea what to do with it.

 

So what do you do? Throw them away. Unwanted pets are thrown away at the side of the road; meanwhile, children are thrown away at the sidelines of life – in front of any willing screened, with blessed passivity, taking them by the hand to places they have no reason to go to.

 

This is how Israeli parents create screen children, pixels instead of pupils, extreme television and Internet reality instead of life made up of real particles.

 

And this is so hard, I know. It’s hard to tell them that we are turning off the screen now; that dad and mom are at home for them; that now is your time together; that their time in front of the screen is limited because life is unlimited.

 

However, you will have to do that. Otherwise, not only will you give up in advance the experience of being parents, you will never know where your children are right now, with the exception of one answer that will always be right: Not in your possession.

 

 


פרסום ראשון: 07.15.12, 19:58
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