Are We Phoning It In?
I was with one of my children and her family recently. The evening meal was ready and she phoned my grand-daughter in her bedroom upstairs to let her know it was dinnertime. Such a trivial action – but it jarred. They are a close family – and perhaps phoning is better than shouting up the stairs, which is what my mum used to do when I was a child. However, it struck me as one more act of distancing – putting wires between us and those who matter most to us.
Phones used to provide us with a lifeline to people geographically inaccessible to us – expensive to use in those days, so used sparingly in our family, but valued for the connection they provided when we were at university, for example.
When Screens Replace Faces
We are now told that 52% of social interaction between girls aged 12-16 is done on their phones – so girls at secondary school connect with friends via their phones more than they do face-to-face, despite spending six hours a day in school with them.
Research, however, tells us that we learn empathy from learning faces – which begins when we are held by our parents or guardians as we feed; theirs is the first face that we learn – so if we are safe, we have plenty of time to learn faces in a relaxed and comfortable place – so we develop a high level of empathy. As phones tighten their hold on the focus of adults and children and our ways of relating, that capacity for empathy is being lost.
The Cost to Connection
Our mental wellbeing generally relies upon the quality of relationships that we enjoy. Our most intimate relationships are usually the most important in sustaining our sense of self as good people so when we fall out with parents, or break up with a partner, we are at our most vulnerable.
But to form intimate partner relationships, my generation and yours probably took it for granted that there would be an attraction to someone that morphed into love as you spent more time in each other’s company, sharing interests and enjoyment, developing mutual respect – and resulting in sexual intimacy.
My talk of ‘making love’ defines me as a dinosaur, according to young people I engage with – and even ‘having sex’ is becoming a bit outdated.
Growing Up Online
Rachel de Souza (Children’s Commissioner) published a report in 2023, stating that, by the age of eleven, 27% of children have viewed pornography. Such a statistic is difficult for me to convert into the sort of world that an increasing number of schoolchildren inhabit. If they are exposed to graphic images before their brains are finished developing, these could become normalised in their minds, with a high possibility that they develop a very warped view of sex and relationships.
The digital dangers don’t stop there. Now, young people may follow toxic influencers or be exposed to damaging influences with long-lasting effects – all the while occupying a desk in a Year 9 classroom. Such habits were often developed and accelerated during lockdowns, as children and young people spent so many hours on their own in their bedrooms.
Losing the Art of Real Connection
The gulf between connecting in the digital world and the world of here and now usually needs sustained empathic intuition to successfully connect with an-other - means that the skills of interpersonal relating and loving are diminishing.
Imagine if they are lost forever; what a very lonely place we will occupy.
