I was at the HOA meeting yesterday. It was held outside. The weather was beautiful. Some people brought kids. Four little boys, aged between 6 and 10 or thereabouts, spent the entire 1,5-hour meeting sitting on the ground and staring at their phones. Not playing, not riding bikes, not running around, not even looking at each other. I had no idea boys even had the capacity to be so silent and immobile while awake.
These aren’t the children of the dregs of society who don’t know any better. These are people who can afford a house in our subdivision. Nice, orderly people who mow their lawns and get to work on time.
It’s always boys, too. I’ve never even seen a girl under the age of 12 glued to a device in a public space. Even within the same family, the female sibling is likely to have a normal childhood while her brother is hooked to a device. It’s a behavior management tool. Boys are active, rambunctious and loud, so they bear the brunt of over-medication and anaesthetization with technology.
Until yesterday I kept wondering how come our neighborhood only produces girls because I haven’t seen a boy on a bike for several years. Girls on bikes criss-cross the neighborhood constantly. I literally didn’t know these boys existed, you know?
My next-door neighbors have boys who grew up right in front of me. They are now in their late teens but as they were growing up, we heard them a lot, running, trawling the little river in the backyard, digging for treasure, skateboarding, yelping, making noises. Gave me such joy to hear the sounds of normal boyhood. And only a couple of years later, boyhood looksb and sounds very different.
These aren’t schools or politicians or any outside forces doing this. These are parents who make this choice out of convenience.
Clarissa's Blog 