I was talking to someone on the bus, as I do, about backward-facing and forward-facing buggies for toddlers. She had been unable to find an off-road buggy (she does a lot of walking on messy bridle paths) with the child facing the buggy pusher, and so ends up leaning round the hood to talk to her grandson. We agreed on the importance of talking to children when you take them out for walks, and on the dangers of the common practice of giving a toddler a phone to play with in the buggy.
Now, Séamas O’Reilly writes about his children in the Guardian at the weekend, revealing their little lives and his responses to their actions. Today he began with this:
“My son likes YouTube. A lot. Most of the videos he watches are inoffensive, some are excellent. We’ve sat together riveted watching videos on everything from craft-making and sea-life to web-skills and basic coding.
His reading and maths comprehension have been demonstrably enhanced by ingeniously constructed tutorials on spelling and multiplication. I have a lot of time, too, for some of his favourite Minecraft and Lego tutorials, but for every lucid and witty piece of programming, there are several thousand which scream and blare hot nonsense directly into his brain.
I’m sceptical about screen-time panic, and the idea that all our children are addicted to digital heroin, but I must admit that it is the latter genre of videos he loves best. I’m forced to wonder about the narcotic effect all those screeched voices and seizure-inducing hyper-edits are having on his brain because it’s irrefutably true: he’s watching a type of programming that simply did not exist when I was a child.”
I agree with most of what he says. Grandson Number Two, now aged 4, used to want to watch Monster Trucks when he was smaller. Now he prefers things with stories and facts. Octonauts is a firm favourite. This is, I think, the truly digital generation, IT savvy from an early age. After all, they’re growing up with it.
Grandson Number Two has just discovered DVDs. Apparently they no longer have a DVD player at their house. If they want to watch a film, they download it. So we can’t lend them DVDs of classic films. Some time ago my brother-in-law gave the smallest grandchildren a few DVDs, Octonauts and other such stuff. My daughter finally brought them here - she’s been doing a bit of de-cluttering - so that the children could watch them at my house. He quickly learnt that it is possible to select episodes and, indeed, to repeat favourite episodes. But he has not yet mastered the remote control, for which we probably should be thankful
The other day, having watched his favourite episode, Octonauts and the Colossal Squid, he asked his mother to repeat it for him. She selected the wrong episode, much to his annoyance, and he set about explaining how to choose the right one. She misunderstood and tried adjusting the position of the screen. A moment of frustration ensued, on both sides, until they went back to the main menu and he explained clearly that she needed to move the selection arrow to the right! Oh, boy! And my daughter is extremely tech savvy but perhaps not with “old” technology.
Here’s something else on what people (not toddlers this time) watch. Actress Gillian Anderson says she is cast as clever women because her “resting face” always looks as though she is thinking deeply. Okay! In her latest role it seems is going to be playing British journalist Emily Maitlis, in Scoop, a film about the process of securing her 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. This was the interview in which he discussed his friendship with sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, his inability to sweat, and the Woking branch of Pizza Express, and, in 50 fast minutes, managed to do more damage to the royal family than five seasons of The Crown. Why on earth, I ask myself, would anyone want to watch a film about that? The mind boggles!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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