Waiting for Lewis

Reflections on a childhood to come

He has had a name for some time now. We await his arrival with much more than the average amount of anticipation generated by life’s events. This is special. And as we all know, there is no baby more important than the baby who is due to arrive, whoever that might be.

In this case, it is Lewis. Soon he will come into one of our long series of days, and will see everything for the first time without any words or sense of self to establish the limits or boundaries of anything he experiences. On top of that, he changes everything for us. He is the embodiment of change itself.

The mother-to-be is preparing. Midwife and the support team are at the ready. Supplies to the home have kept up a steady flow. Grandparents are in place and helping as they can to assemble and organize baby paraphernalia, cut the grass, run errands.

Getting ready for reading. Never too early.

Lots of doing going on. But I am also noticing an interior shift. I can only speak for myself. The shift is profound yet subtle.

I have noticed the thinness of time. We are here, as we have always been. He is somewhere else. Suddenly he will be before our eyes, like life’s greatest magic trick. Presto.

I feel an emptying. I don’t know of what. Best I can describe, it is a sense of a tiny sphere of void somewhere in the midst of us as I move through the day. A baby-sized place holder, empty but moving, gesticulating, shaping the air that he will occupy.

I hear the sound of an internal blackboard being erased. Some of us remember that sound of the block of felt eraser being drawn back and forth across the dull black surface of the chalk board, smearing the lines, the equations, the images — rubbing them all to the ever-fainter residue of dust. Am I preparing for a new lesson? It is as though I want to receive this newcomer with an openness, a newness that might not even have words yet, or ever.

Blackboard content, half erased. Image supplied by ChatGPT

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Lately I have been taking note of what others are writing about children and the people that babies become. There is a Millennial columnist “Viv” whom my daughter Molly likes. Viv writes a critique of a phenomenon she calls “ambitious parenting.”

Against Ambitious Parenting

It is a fabulous piece written with wit, humor and honesty. Here she reflects on a contradiction in her generation:

It’s puzzling! It’s strange. It seems we all share the same posts about how sad it is that childhood seems to be going away. How a delimited existence is a dim thing for a child. How Gen-Z is all fucked up because they never learned how to go outside… And yet. And yet. We share these posts, and then happily go back to discussing our plans for carefully delimiting our future children’s existences.

There are no formulas, and contradictions abound. Related to this theme is the challenge of raising children in the Information Age, with a lot of hand-wringing about technology.

The tools of the Information Age — computers, networks, the internet, and digital communication — allow us, for better or worse, to connect with any one, any where, all the time about anything.

And anyone at any age can avail themselves of the digital device. It can be the size of a juice box and contains more computing power than was available in 1969 to the entire Apollo space program.

Molly shared with me this post on X by Matt Bateman.

I strongly recommend giving a 4yo an iPad, strictly for the child’s sake. Details in next reply.

As a provocative post, it hits all the bumpers (to use a pinball machine analogy). But he presents what seems to me like a plausible argument which he laid out in his subsequent Substack:

A sensitive period for texting

His argument is specific and nuanced. The salient point is that he set up the iPad to offer his child three specific and limited “affordances” — she can take pictures, type notes, and text with family and a small group of friends. That’s it. He tempered the tool to benefit the specific user.

What I found interesting, and somewhat alarming, were the sheer number of comments. Some were laudatory (e.g., “This is the best take I’ve seen about limiting bad screen time and maximizing good screen time”). A few expressed curiosity, but many were surprisingly critical (e.g. “I’ve heard some dumb things in my life, but this is top 10,” and “This guy hates the future generations,” and the classic “Idiot.”)

My favorite exchange:

His argument for the benefits of this approach raises the interesting point about helping the child adapt to the specific time in which she has come to live.

In a world of people bent on taking their own anxiety about technology and introjecting it as full blown misanthropy and civilizational alienation in every child, give your child the humanistic gift of loving the information age.

It is difficult to imagine a corollary in the previous ages of human development — parental anxiety about exposure to stone, or bronze, or iron.

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Lewis already has what I would call an auspicious beginning. His starting place will be filled with a network of amazing people, the center of which is his mother who has, I can say with total objectivity, all the qualities of a fabulous Mom.

As he grows he will adapt to a world that we can barely imagine. How will he and his peers balance time in the digital world with time in the one with the blue sky? How will he hone the skills of information literacy¹ in the age of truth-bending?

I have no idea. But he will. I believe they all will.

Molly, waiting for Lewis. Photo by S. Hickman

1. From article by the Library and Information Science Education Network: Information literacy is an essential skill set that empowers individuals to navigate the vast and ever-expanding realm of information with confidence and discernment. Information literacy encompasses the critical thinking, analytical, and technological skills needed to assess information’s credibility, relevance, and reliability effectively. (emphasis mine)