A s we sat around the dinner table last night, the children and I, a conversation took place that was for everyone else innocently cheerful — avariciously cheerful, even — and for me, fraught with tension, remorse, and anxiety. And I found myself wondering: Am I alone in this?
“I’m just asking,” said the 6 1/2-year-old,” wiping her mouth with a napkin and putting her hand up to ward off premature objections. “When do you think I will get an iPod?”
The other heads at the table whipped around to see what I’d say. “Truthfully?” I said untruthfully, “Probably never.”
“Oh,” she said, after a moment. “OK.”
This was so reasonable that I had to relent. “I suppose someday you will get an iPod,” I conceded, “but given that you’ve only just learned to ride a bike without training wheels, it seems to me that you have a lot of time to do other things before you start fiddling with technology.”
The two oldest nodded to each other as if to say, “Yeah, Mummy hates technology.”
“I don’t hate technology!” I protested, getting ahead of myself, because, secretly, I do.
“Yay!” yipped the 8-year-old, “Then can I get an iPod?”
“Me first! Me before you,” said the 11-year-old, sticking out his chest.
“There’s no point gettingan iPod until you have a computer,” said the eldest, who’s almost 14, in lordly tones. She does have a computer, because her tolerant father and apprehensive mother got her one for her birthday last year. It seemed like a good idea at the time and I have rued it ever since. Nine years after achieving literacy, this daughter’s voracious novel-reading dried up upon contact with a Macbook faster than you can say “Wikipedia.”
The conversation went on with the children getting more and more joyfully enthusiastic about the devices they hoped to acquire, and in what order — whether by age, or sex, or by who was the most virtuous — and I fell to thinking.
Our household was infiltrated by iPods in the most innocuous manner: They came as gifts, from amazingly kind and generous people. It seemed silly to possess iPods and not use them, so my husband’s and my laptops started running iTunes, and for that, of course, we really needed a pre-teen intercessor. Our then-pre-teen was only too happy to help, because two — two! — of the gift iPods had been given to her.
As the eager voices pealed across the dining room, I looked at the toddler and wondered how soon she’d be asking for a pair of ear buds.
It’s not that iPods are the listening device of the devil. It’s not that I’m opposed to music, or fun, or grooving around in my own private Idaho. I’m in favor of all that — and impressed by my friends who download George Eliot so they can listen to “Daniel Deronda” on the treadmill.
But in family life, in an existential paraphrase of William S. Burroughs, tuning in generally means dropping out. Computers and iPods have an atomizing, isolating effect that’s ideal if you want siblings to sit in total silence, but is distinctly unhelpful if your goal is to build a warm, connected domestic life.
Furthermore — and this I confess was at the deepest heart of why the children’s happy prattle was so gloom-making — it’s crushing, this steady ratcheting-up of expectations of expense. Children can’t be expected to know what an iPod costs, or a laptop, and even if they’re told the number seems fine to them. Why wouldn’t it? Children are liable to describe the amount of brownies they just ate as “sixty-five nine-hundred.”
So I ask you: Am I alone in this? Does everyone else sit at dinner, beaming indulgently eagerly as their children describe the wondrous gizmos they hope you’ll buy them? Perhaps you do. It was only a few weeks ago, come to think of it, that our eldest gave a little glimpse of a fresh hell that awaits heel-dragging mothers like me.
“Guess what Gretchen got for her birthday,” she said lightly, that terrible day. “An iPhone.”
