Loving Children: A Design Problem (2002)
The Sky Mall catalogue, conveniently available as an anes-thetic for irritated airplane passengers, recently offered an item that spoke volumes about our approach to raising children. For a price of several hundred dollars, parents could order a device th
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Children: A Design Problem (2002)
T
he SkyMall catalogue, conveniently available as an anesthetic for irritated airplane passengers, recently offered an item that spoke volumes about our approach to raising children. For a price of several hundred dollars, parents could order a device that could be attached to a television set that would control access to the television. Each child would be given a kind of credit card, programmed to limit the hours he or she could watch TV. The child so disciplined would presumably benefit by imbibing fewer hours of mind-numbing junk. He or she might also benefit from the perverse challenge to discover the many exciting and ingenious ways to subvert the technology and the intention behind it, including a flank attack on parental rules and public decency via the Internet. My parents had a rather different approach to the problem. It was the judicious and authoritative use of the word no. It cost nothing. My brother, sister, and I knew what it meant and the consequences for ignoring it. Still, I sometimes acted otherwise. It was a way to test the boundaries of freedom and parental love and the relation between the two. The SkyMall device and the authoritative use of the word no both represent concern for the welfare of the child, but they are fundamentally different design approaches to the problem of raising children, and they have very different effects on the child. The device approach to discipline This article was originally published in 2002. D.W. Orr, Hope Is an Imperative: The Essential David Orr, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-017-0_18, © David W. Orr 2011
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is driven by three factors that are new to parenting. It is a product of a commercial culture in which we’ve come to believe that high-tech gadgetry can fix human problems, including that of teaching discipline and self-control to children. Moreover, the device is intended mostly for parents who are absent from the home for much of the day because they must (or think they must) work to make an expanding number of ends meet. And, all of our verbal assurances of love notwithstanding, it is a product of a society that does not love its children competently enough to teach them self-discipline. The device approach to parenting is merely emblematic of a larger problem that has to do with the situation of childhood within an increasingly dysfunctional society absorbed with things, economic growth, and self. We claim to love our children, and I believe that most of us do. But like sheep, we have acquiesced in the design of a society that corrupts genuine love. One result is a growing mistrust of our children that easily turns to fear and dislike. In a recent survey, for example, only one-third of adults believed that today’s young people “will eventually make this country a better place” (Applebome 1997). Instead, we find them “rude” and “irresponsible.” And often they are. We find them overly materialistic and unconcerned about politics, values, and improving society. And many are too
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