How lazy to introduce children to technology

Now Candela, who is already 14 months old, has taken to talking all the time on the phone.

She uses various gadgets, be it the landline receiver, the remote control of the TV or a banana from the Canary Islands.

Sometimes he gives us the device on duty so that we can talk, so I make up that I talk to NASA, in case they want a girl astronaut, or to the hardware store, in case they want a doll that says incomprehensible things (when he talks on the phone). , or with the mime factory, where they are preparing a succulent batch for us.

I don't know who she's talking to, because I still don't understand her language, because she still speaks in baby.

I have an unproven theory that babies continue to inhabit a parallel world where the unborn and the dead are, the place we all come from and the place we all return to, and that Candela talks to that world, where now my mother.

He still talks to her.

My mother, on her deathbed, seemed to see people who were already there, taking a place, and that we didn't see (or at least that's what a friend said when mom lost her gaze in some corner of the room).

Then, as we grow, we forget about those otherworldly places and that is why we are afraid of dying.

Let me dream: similar beliefs have accompanied humanity for millennia, and they never seemed ridiculous.

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“Since they are born, children must be provided with technology”

What worries me that Candela is determined to speak with I don't know where are not metaphysical issues, but a very palpable one: that she is beginning to interact, in a still very primitive way, with technology.

The issue that most held me back when it came to being a father was precisely the prospect of having to raise a child in a hyper-technological world, in which it is not that we use technology, it is that we live within it.

If we have a hard time keeping parental addiction at bay, how are we going to get our children to develop responsible use?

Sometimes I play to look at the world with Candela's neonate eyes, with the ones she has now and the ones she will have in a year or three.

I mean, as if she had just fallen on this planet.

The vision of the subway car with the vast majority of travelers lost in the midst of the

seems dystopian to me, as if an extraterrestrial civilization had colonized our brains or as if we had connected ourselves to a great universal system, like a cosmic mind. , of which we are now prisoners,

The reality is not very different from this idea.

Those of us of a certain age, not too old either, at least we have known a world in which waiting in line at the supermarket or traveling on the line bus we had time to observe others or lose ourselves in our own thoughts, and not in those of others. a twitter troll

But perhaps for Candela, who will not know previous times, the crazy techno-addicted world will be normal: that idea of ​​normalization that what seems so abnormal to me overwhelms me.

The other day in a Mexican restaurant I saw a family with four children and all four of them were connected to a

, so as not to disturb.

The parents watched football on TV in the dining room, gulping down Coronita and tacos al pastor.

We should not judge the ways of educating others, especially when we do not know the inside story of each one, but the image was, to say the least, disturbing, especially considering that the youngest was a baby in the arms of his mother, consuming maddening animations in full noise and color with her brain still cream.

The ubiquity of screens,

and

, although it seems forever, has actually been (surprisingly) a few years ago, and we still do not know the medium and long-term effects that intensive use of this technology can cause in children (or adults).

Since everything goes by class, it is common for lower-income families to expose their children to screens for longer (due to lack of time or information) than wealthier families.

Now it's my turn to soak up the thousand pedagogical methods to introduce Candela to technology, always afraid of being too permissive and offering her as a sacrifice to the network like someone who offers a ram to the technological gods;

or being too strict, raising her in an Amish anachronism and thus losing a great talent for computer engineering: maybe otherwise the

would have managed to be a Silicon Valley guru (and make us rich).

Some gurus, by the way, who, as is known, do not even jokingly approach their children to the technology that they themselves produce, like those drug traffickers who never consume their own merchandise.

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