The other night I walked into my tweener's bedroom to say good-night and paused to chuckle at what I saw. My son, an avid reader, had strapped a head lamp to his forehead and was flipping through unseen pages of his new e-reader. I remembered when I was his age, sneaking a flashlight and book into bed so I could read before falling asleep. Apparently, this tradition has now gone high-tech.
While I'm generally a proponent of new technology, I can't help but long for a simpler time — a time when children played with friends to stop robbers, explore the stars, or fight off evil Commies. Even when our friends couldn't play, we'd engage in worthy solitary pursuits like building a jig-saw puzzle or reading a book — a real book.
But today, our kids face a myriad of alternatives tempting them to stay inside, apart from their peers: video games, social networking and texting, to name a few. This reality first confronted me more than a decade ago when my oldest son, now in college, came running home from school on a picture-perfect spring day to IM (instant message) a friend of his who lived just around the corner.
"No!" I told him. "Go outside and play. It's beautiful outside!"
"Oh," he responded, obviously confounded by the creativity and originality of my idea.
Children aren't the only ones answering the siren call of technology. Parents, too, are affected. I've seen it at Scout meetings, ball practice and restaurants. Adults get seated in their respective corners and instead of socializing, getting to know each other and sharing parenting trials and tribulations, they pull out their smart phones and "plug in."
There is still hope, though. My youngest son, as much as he likes video games, also likes to shoot hoops and play football — both outdoor activities. He's active in Scouts and I know other kids active in sports. So the good news is that children still have options — we have not completely lost them to technology.
That same night I "caught" my son reading in bed we had watched one of our favorite TV shows together, during which one of the characters held up an old PC game called "Zork."
"What's Zork?" My son asked, with the same derisive tone he used when I first showed him my old LPs.
"It's a text-based PC game," I explained. He looked at me inquisitively, so I gave him a description of what that entailed: no graphics and a lot of typing. I expected him to brush it off, but he surprised me. "That sounds like fun."
Fun? Huh? Definitely not the reaction I expected, but it made me think that maybe our kids also long for a simpler time — a time when they could use their own imaginations and engage in creative pursuits, instead of having some nameless programmer do that for them.
Albert White, of Maryland Heights, is a freelance writer. He has four children ranging in age from 11 to 22. He is involved in Scouting, enjoys reading and a variety of board games, and is a self-professed sci-fi and comic book "geek."
