Reclaiming Childhood

What Screens Have Taken

The argument about children and screens is by now familiar.

They consume too much time. They fragment attention. They make boredom harder to tolerate. They replace outdoor play, conversation, wandering about, making things, and all the other untidy occupations from which childhood was once largely constructed.

Most parents need little persuading on any of this.

Not all screen use is the same, of course. Reading a book on a Kindle is hardly equivalent to scrolling through an endless feed. The concern here is principally with the interactive screen: the one that responds instantly, changes constantly and allows the child to summon something new the moment interest begins to fade.

The more interesting question is what, exactly, has been displaced—and whether all of those losses are equally serious.

A child who spends less time outside loses something important. So does one who rarely has to invent a game, wait for anything, or find some way of entertaining himself when the world has inconsiderately failed to provide entertainment.

But among these losses sits another which is easier to miss.

Language.

The Stakes

Whatever else a child learns, one ability sits underneath almost all of it: the ability to express oneself clearly in one’s own language and, if possible, persuasively.

Medicine has its technical language. So do engineering, law, finance and science. But the people working inside those disciplines still have to explain what they think, understand what somebody else means, make distinctions, resolve disagreements and occasionally persuade another human being.

The same is true once everyone goes home.

Relationships require it. So does judgment. So does explaining oneself when something has gone wrong, recognizing when somebody else is being evasive, or simply working out what one really thinks.

And this is before we get anywhere near the grander claims about critical thinking.

The Language Children Hear

A rather important question, then, presents itself: where, exactly, are children supposed to acquire all this language?

Children acquire an enormous amount of language through conversation. But conversation has limits, for the simple reason that ordinary life usually does not require extraordinary language.

We speak in fragments. We repeat ourselves. We point at things. We rely on shared context. Familiar words generally do the job.

There is no reason to describe the kitchen majestically while asking somebody to pass the salt.

Books, however, operate under different conditions.

A story may need to conjure a ship in a storm, a ruined city, a jealous king, an impossible bargain or a forest at midnight.

The language has to do the work, and book language is typically richer, more complex and more precise than the language of daily life.

This could easily be filed away as a pleasant educational benefit of books.

But it is considerably more than that.

If command of language sits beneath so much of what a child will later need to do, then sustained exposure to rich language is not some decorative extra to childhood.

Among all the things screens have displaced, its loss may be one of those worth worrying about most.

A Peculiar Exchange

What replaced it can, of course, look extraordinarily rich.

A child with a screen can travel through fantasy worlds, explore space, meet monsters and witness adventures that would once have required a fairly determined imagination.

There is only one catch.

Most of the imagining has already been done.

The castle has been designed. The monster has been drawn. The hero already has a face. The music tells us how to feel. The pace has been chosen and the tension supplied.

A child can spend hours in imaginary worlds while having to imagine surprisingly little.

That is a curious achievement.

It is not an argument against film or animation. Both can be magnificent.

But the exchange is worth noticing.

The experience becomes richer on the outside while asking rather less of the child on the inside.

It is wonderfully efficient, though childhood may have needed rather less efficiency than we imagined.

Being Read To

Simply imposing “screen limits” can only ever be half an answer.

What has been underused has to be used again.

Going outside restores movement, exploration and contact with a physical world gloriously indifferent to whether the child finds it sufficiently entertaining. And conversation restores the give-and-take of another mind.

But reading aloud does something else.

The method is almost comically low-tech.

One person has a book.

Another listens.

That is more or less the entire apparatus.

Yet it allows a child to encounter language far beyond the level he or she could comfortably read alone.

Independent reading is necessarily constrained by what a child can decode. Listening is not constrained in the same way.

An unfamiliar word can be understood from the story around it. A long sentence can be followed because somebody else carries the mechanics of reading. Complex language can arrive before complex reading ability.

A child can therefore enter linguistic territory years ahead of the books he or she could manage independently.

Putting Something Back

The question is not really whether screens are going away.

They are not.

Nor need they.

The more useful question is what remains in a child’s life alongside them.

Time outdoors matters. Conversation matters. Making things, inventing things, being bored occasionally and discovering that boredom is survivable—all of it matters.

But reading aloud deserves particular attention because language deserves particular attention.

A child who develops a large, flexible command of language acquires something that travels almost everywhere: into school, work, friendships, disagreements, judgment, and the ability to say precisely what one means and notice when somebody else has not.

Later, we may call some of this reasoning. Or communication. Or critical thinking.

Long before any of that, there were words.

That is a very large return from an activity which, on the surface, consists of an adult opening a book.

Perhaps that is the point.

The things screens have displaced were often ordinary enough to be overlooked.

A walk.

A conversation.

A stretch of boredom.

A story before bed.

None looked especially important while they were happening.

But some were doing rather more work than we knew.