Raising digital natives

father looks at the challenges of parenting in a world that has gone to bits and bytes

The other day, I was driving my eight-year-old son to school, and we were almost at its doorstep, when he turned to me and said, “Download.”

I gave a knowing nod, took a U-turn and headed back home.

Whenever he has to expel the contents of his bowels, my son uses this digital metaphor, which he must have picked up around four years ago. Hearing him use the word in this extended sense every day — sometimes, twice a day — all these years, has forever enhanced its meaning for me.

Raising digital natives enriches not just the vocabulary, but the entire life. For one thing, you are continually doused in flashlight. Child number two — who is three-and-a-half-years old — is an incurable selfie addict. She picks up one of our cellphones and skilfully swipes around to set up a selfie shoot. Her selfies suggest a sense of community, as she almost always gets someone to pose along with her. I have figured in many of her selfies, often with disastrous results.

Her selfies go against the spirit of the invention. Selfies were invented to make those who look good, look great. And those who look ordinary, look good. Selfies enable you to keep posing till you get it right — that is, till you look good. If you don’t get that look even after infinite tries, you can simply delete them all. With the daughter, that is as much of an impossibility as a sleigh ride through snow on Mercury. In most of her selfies, I look like something that even the cat would refuse to drag into the house. Why don’t I delete those self-deflating selfies? The loving daughter that she is, she wants to preserve every selfie she takes with me. Not just that, she tries to make me a star, showing off those selfies to anyone who comes visiting us.

When technology was in its embryonic stage, strategies to save hard-earned money from children were simpler in design and effective in application. The best of the strategies: to avoid burning a hole in their pocket, parents simply avoided taking the children to certain shops. But now, what can parents do when commerce has set up shop in their bedroom?

Recently, my eight-year-old called me to say he had ordered a basketball on Flipkart with the cash-on-delivery option, using his mother’s cellphone. On an earlier date, when I was dragging my feet on a family vacation, the boy stormed into the room. “Just tell me if I should book a ticket for you to Kuttalam. We are going anyway.” With online booking resources and assistance from a mother and grandparents who pamper him no end, calling him ‘Gadget Guru’, I knew it was a threat he just might carry out. If not today, certainly someday in the not-too-far-away future.

In many homes, parent-child bonding has gone digital. While trying to connect with children, and sometimes win them over, parents see the necessity of learning and speaking the digital language. In the past, voluntary groups focussed on building families through counselling would advertise their services with photos of a family playing a board game. Now, it is not unusual to see these groups displaying on their websites, photos of children playing a video game with their parents. I tried that route to bonding. I immigrated to the digital world, and tried to keep pace with my eight-year-old digital native. I would play video games on Playstation 2, and later Xbox 360, with him.

It turned out to be an unhappy immigration experience. As I could not guide him when he reached the challenging levels in those games, he got tired of this ‘bonding’ exercise and started looking for digital natives who would bring expertise to the table.

At present, my daughter utters only kindergarten sentences of the digital language, and therefore looks up to me as her guide for online games, which include her favourite Baby Hazel Games series. The bonding exercise is going well. It will — until we reach the difficult levels.

Source | Financial Express | 22 June 2015