Instant Gratification

 Hi and welcome to my rant for the day! Quickly- hurry up....here we go.

Have you noticed that we're raising a whole generation of kids that have no idea how to wait for anything?  They live in an instantaneous world and know nothing else. They’ve teethed on instant oatmeal, rice and hot cocoa. They eat microwaved foods.  There’s an instant queue on Netflix, instant replay in sports and let’s not forget instant messaging.  Instant communication via cellphone, instant information on computers and instant banking are now the norm.

No wonder they all seem to be on overload, have teeny tiny attention spans and don’t understand that good things come to those who wait.

This week Marisa and I took a field trip to the Long Island Children’s Museum in Garden City.  We went with new friends we found through homeschooling.  I’m happy that Marisa found Briana and it’s a bonus that I like her mother. We had a lot of fun.

The highlights of the trip were the television studio and the radio room.  The girls created their own news show and reported the weather before a green screen.  They had to figure out where to stand and read from scripts and Teleprompters.  In the radio room we collaborated and created a show complete with guests and commercials. 

In the museum there was an area that had big black desk phones with rotary dials-you know, the really old ones that I grew up with.  They were beautiful. I was brought back in time to a bygone era when there was no speed dial and every call was made by turning that large metal dial with the big white numbers around and around, again and again.  Oh, it made me wax nostalgic for a princess cradle phone, ivory colored with gold tone accents.

But I digress (sigh)

The girls dialed the phones to talk to each other, but before they could connect, they got frustrated, hung up  and stated that ‘they weren’t working’.  We told them to wait- but they were off and running to the next exhibit- to find something that moved faster or immersed them more quickly.

Most people have joked about our need for instant gratification at one time or another but it isn’t a joke anymore.  It’s a living breathing entity that as a society we have created.  There’s no way to stuff the beast in a bag and make believe it isn’t here- so we need to coexist with it, but it changes the face of our culture and in my opinion, not necessarily all for the better. Let’s take my personal pet peeve as one example.

Letter writing.

The art of writing a letter is almost dead.  Sending a handwritten Thank You card by mail seems to have gone by the wayside- heck even the skill set of handwriting itself is no longer deemed essential in today’s technologically advanced world

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Schools feel it’s not necessary, that we need to move forward and that it takes too much time

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Look, I understand there are tradeoffs.  I recognize this is the world that we live in and technology is great.  I’m certainly not looking to go backwards- but I do think that we as parents, should show some restraint. I am a techno freak myself and am intravenously attached to gadgets, but I also know how to live without them.  It’s sort of like teaching kids to use a calculator without learning math, or type on a keybard without learning how to write. Shortcuts are quick, but quick does not necessarily mean 'best'.

 Kids get too much too fast and the basics are thrown by the wayside.  Sometimes I fear that we immerse them in so much that we are creating an anxious neurotic generation.  Does an eight year old really need a cellphone, an iPod Touch and a laptop?  Do they need a constant stream of instant input, information and stimulation?

I’ve been a mother for a really long time.  Joe is thirty, Marisa’s ten so it doesn’t take a calculator (unless you never learned the basics) to do the math. I have seen a lot come and go in my years of parenting and I can say without any reservation that children now seem more stressed  than when Joe and Rob were young. 

We try to give them the best but maybe in all of that shuffling from one activity to another, they really just need downtime. Time to be alone with a book or a sketchpad or a skateboard. To not have their whole day scheduled and doled out and apportioned. Time without an electronic device.

Maybe they just need some time to stop.

And wait.

And who knows...It just might be the best lesson they ever learn.