Tablets at the table
A recent trend I’ve seen at restaurants over the last five years or so is kids glued to screens sitting next to family members who are talking to each other at meals. I’m not immune from this - when my daughter was a toddler, we’d also dutifully pack up our iPad, along with 5,344 coloring books, stickers, and crayons. We’d go through all of our non-digital assets during the meal, and then, finally, exhausted and scraped up, we’d finally give our child the iPad just in time to catch 7.5 minutes of peace and quiet.
Going to restaurants with small children is HARD (as is all life with children under 5). But what I’m seeing more and more of is kids who are now fully capable of paying attention, around 9, 10 years old, at the table enmeshed in devices, even as the rest of the family is talking.
When I was growing up, I was often bored silly in settings where adults were talking about politics, family history, and other stuff that held zero interest for me.
Looking back now, I believe that those family gatherings were crucial in forming my worldview, how I argue, and how I understand things. I was passively absorbing and learning.
In his beautiful, moving autobiography, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” Israeli author Amoz Oz writes about a similar experience, growing up in 1940s Jerusalem, when he went with his parents to cafes where they talked for hours with their friends,
I had a specific role in these conversations at the café. First of all I had to give polite, intelligent answers, just like a grown-up, to such difficult questions as how old I was, what class I was in at school, did I collect stamps or have a scrapbook, what did they teach us these days in geography, what did they teach us in Hebrew, was I a good boy, what had I read by Dov Kimche (or Yaari, or Kadari, or Even-Zahav, or Shenhar), did I like all my teachers? And occasionally: had I started to take an interest in young ladies yet? And what would I be when I grew up—a professor too? Or a pioneer? Or a field marshal in the armies of Israel? (I came to the conclusion at that time that writers were phony and even somewhat ridiculous.)
Secondly, my task was not to get in the way.
I had to be nonexistent, invisible.
Their café talk lasted at least seventy hours at a time, and for the whole of this eternity I had to embody an even more silent presence than the softly humming fan on the ceiling.
I developed a secret little game that I could play for hours on end without moving, without speaking, with no accessories, not even a pencil and paper. I would look at the strangers in the café and try to guess, from their clothes and gestures, from the paper they were reading or the drinks they had ordered, who they all were, where they came from, what they did, what they had done just before they came here, and where they were going afterward. That woman over there who had just smiled to herself twice—I tried to deduce from her expression what she was thinking. That thin young man in a cap who had not taken his eyes off the door and was disappointed every time anyone came in: what was he thinking about? What did the person he was waiting for look like? I sharpened my ears and stole snatches of conversation out of the air. I leaned over and peeped to see what everyone was reading, I observed who was in a hurry to leave and who was just settling down.
To this day I pickpocket in this way. Especially from strangers. Especially in busy public places. In line at the clinic, for instance, or in some bureaucratic waiting room, at the railway station or the airport. Even sometimes when I am driving, in a traffic jam, peeping into the car next to me. Peeping and making up stories. Peeping again, and making up more stories. Where does she come from, by her clothes, her expression, her gestures as she touches up her makeup? What is her home like? What is her man like? Or take that boy over there with the unfashionably long sideburns, holding his mobile phone in his left hand while his other hand describes slicing movements, exclamation marks, distress signals: why exactly is he getting ready to fly to London tomorrow? What is his failing business? Who is waiting for him there? What do his parents look like? Where do they come from? What was he like as a child? And how is he planning to spend the evening, and the night, after he lands in London?
This was how Oz became a writer: through the power of boredom and observation. He later went on to become a candidate for the Nobel Prize and an important author with a deep impact on modern Israel.
Even if we’re not geniuses or literary talents, there are many such articles about how important boredom is recently, and how we don’t get enough of it.
If it’s important for us adults, how much more important is it for kids, whose brains are still forming, to be bored? Don’t we want our kids to become important authors? Thinkers? Musicians? I’m pretty sure my kid isn’t going to win the Nobel Prize, but I see her coming up with much more creative stories when she’s not passively consuming media.
And, just as importantly, don’t we want our kids to learn the art of conversation? To learn how to have arguments, to learn our family history?
But - how do we enforce boredom when we, ourselves (me included) are constantly on our smartphones?
Ultimately, I think that we’ll become so saturated in devices that not having one will be seen as prestigious, and that’s when we’ll start putting them away, both for ourselves and our kids. Until then, there’s always Fruit Ninja.
Art: Zinaida Serebriakova , At breakfast, 1914
What I’m reading lately:
This book, “Because Internet” is so much fun!
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I’m a data scientist in Philadelphia. Most of my free time is spent wrangling a preschooler and an infant, reading, and writing bad tweets. I also have longer opinions on things. Find out more here or follow me on Twitter.