Kids These Days
By Hannah Katch

I need to stop dreaming about my kids. I have daily responsibility for 13 four-and-five-year-olds at a summer day camp, and as much as I love hanging out with them, invading my dreams is taking it too far. I keep waking up in the middle of the night convinced that they have wandered off, engrossed in some wonderful game of dragons and elves, and I can’t find them. It seems that this summer, both waking and sleeping, I’ve been thinking a lot about these children.

When I was five, the thing I loved best was when my big sister and I would hide out in the shed/homemade theater in our backyard, and put on a play. We would spend hours designing sets, costumes and plotlines and, with a dramatic flourish, we would perform for anyone near enough to get roped in – if one of us hadn’t run away in tears from an argument before we could finish. My family didn’t have a TV, so this was our preferred method of self-entertainment: arguing over twists in plot and changes in blocking. We even invented a secret language with which to talk about our next production around parental ears without ruining the surprise.

Now my sister is a professional actress in Chicago, and I listen in horror to these kids’ talk of Buffy the Vampire Slayer while watching them struggle to come up with an idea for a game that doesn’t involve a TV character.

I love working with kids, especially little ones. I love the idea that their future preconceptions about the world are being made now, that the way they deal with people and conflict and emotions for the rest of their lives is being built while I watch. I love being allowed to be a small part of that process, but I worry about these kids, about their lack of curiosity and their apparent inability to sit and listen to a story that doesn’t involve a flat-screen TV.

So I try to talk to my kids about it. Lets come up with a game that doesn’t have somebody from TV in it, I say. Lets be unicorns walking through the forest. What should happen next? I’m quick to jump to the assumptions that my childhood was the best of all possible worlds, that children should be raised with a minimum of gadgets and dismembered body part simulations. However, without high definition or hand-held controllers, these kids do come up with some wonderful stories (the unicorns stumble upon a fairy princess in disguise who asks for help defending herself from the evil troll) and I’m left to wonder about my own preconceptions.

The skills I gained while negotiating with my sister over reasonable rules for our games or coming up with a mutually satisfactory plot line are invaluable, and I’m worried that these kids with their XBoxes are missing out on that. I’m concerned that these kids miss out on a lot while they’re inside playing with their high tech gadgets. I no longer argue against them completely, I’m not convinced that they are, in themselves, harmful. But I want every kid to spend hours arguing over the guidelines for an invented game or ask about the different kinds of caterpillars they find in the tress.

I wonder if part of the problem is the schools. Elementary school kids are so pressured to do well on standardized tests, I worry that they forget why they were curious in the first place. When our camp’s director brought in her pet lizard to show the kids and enthusiastically asked if they had any questions, the counselors were the ones asked about it’s origins and feeding habits while the kids looked bored and pulled each other’s hair. I have to worry about an educational system where the kids are no longer eager to ask questions.

When, in my early teenage-hood, my family finally broke down and bought a TV, I spent a lot of time finding out what I had missed. If I had some free time, I would spend it in front of the TV catching up on old episodes of Friends or Sex and the City. After a while the novelty wore off, but I understand the appeal and the benefit of a TV: it’s a very effective tool for shutting off my brain after a long and stress-filled workday. And I understand the worry of so many parents that their kids need to study harder in school to get into a Good College and become Successful. But when, night after night, these kids invade my dreams, I more often than not dream about them playing. I’m not so worried that are going to become my future congressmen and meteorologists and teachers aren’t going to know the important answers. I worry that they won’t know how to ask the important questions.