Post: Kids and Portable Media in Public:
Some Thoughts on Etiquette
Kids and Portable Media in Public:
Some Thoughts on Etiquette
My husband, daughter, and I had just settled in for lunch at one of our favorite local restaurants when another family was escorted to the next table. The mother helped the little girl, who looked to be about 4, off with her coat and lifted her into the booster seat.
Then, before removing her own coat, the mother placed a personal DVD player on the table in front of her daughter and hit the "play" button. Disney's "Cinderella" started up, and the little girl began to watch. Without headphones.
Even after we moved to a table on the other side of the restaurant, we could hear the strains of "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" as we ate tandoori chicken and talked about how many things were wrong with that picture.
Here's what we concluded:
First, the little girl's parents were teaching her to completely disregard the feelings, the rights, and the preferences of anyone else. The DVD made it harder for us to hear one another and the waiter and impossible to enjoy the quiet music that is normally a part of the restaurant's pleasant atmosphere.
Second, her parents showed the child she had nothing of interest to tell them and they had nothing they felt was worth discussing with her. Family meals and car rides are the best time to share the stories of our days, to coordinate upcoming plans, to discuss the news in our communities, and to make clear our values and priorities.
Third, the parents failed to take advantage of the opportunity to teach their daughter an indispensable life skill -- the ability to participate in thoughtful and courteous conversation. Children need to learn the structure of a conversation, namely how to listen, when to nod, how to look the person who is speaking in the eye, and how to know whether the other person understands and is interested in what you are saying.
The art of conversation also involves knowing how to include everyone in the discussion, how to select the appropriate details to evoke a scene or convey an opinion, and how to disagree without being disagreeable.
Fourth, the girl's parents lost the opportunity to show their daughter how to pay attention to what is going on around her. The more we allow children to numb their brains and cut themselves off from their environment, the less we are able to encourage their powers of observation and inspire their imaginations.
Parents should stretch their children's attention spans, a challenge in this media-saturated world. One way to do that is to set an example by turning off television, iPods, BlackBerrys, cell phones, and PDAs when the family is together.
Children need to learn to be engaged observers. Parents should both set an example and explicitly teach their families to be junior Sherlock Holmeses, seeing what they can deduce from what they see, and junior Scheherazades, telling stories to develop their senses of narrative, drama, and humor.
As we looked across the room at this family -- the girl watching the movie, the father talking on his cell phone, the mother looking down at her plate -- we wished there was a "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" spell to turn their devices into pumpkins and get them to talk to each other.
This article was adapted from a column originally run in the Chicago Tribune.
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