The smart phones can wait!

Mother pointed out the seldom-used front door of our farmhouse east of Sun Prairie WI toward a small white building on the horizon — the one-room Oak Lawn School. Her oldest child would walk there the next morning, unaccompanied, to learn how to read greatly aided by listening to the older kids. Enrollment: fewer than two dozen. Eisenhower was still in his first term as President. Elvis Presley was unknown in Wisconsin. Mrs. Taylor announced that a girl from the previous school year would not be with us. Polio.

At recess, kids kicked a red dodgeball over the roof of the small whitewashed school to the refrain of “Annie Annie Over.” Kids on the other side fought to catch it. 

The older boys built a snow fort behind the boy’s outhouse, bringing blocks of refrozen snow through the culvert under County Road VV like Pharaoh’s slaves. A burlap bag concealed the low, crawl-through entrance. One ice ball from that fortress leveled the flimsy snow fort built by the girls and us little boys behind the other outhouse. Their victory complete, the big boys invited us little guys (there were only two of us) to inspect their domain. No girls allowed.

 Seen a teeter totter lately?

An initiation rite: an older student elevated the first grader on the teeter totter, then stepped off to crash the startled yard ape to the ground. Allowed classmates to play with the toy rifle I brought to school.

Later, at Sacred Hearts school in town, the merry-go-round of death spun like an Iranian nuclear centrifuge. We hung on for dear life, horizontally. (Physics, at work!) Eighth grade boys were kings of the hill on snow piles plowed from the parking lot that was our playground, now beaten down into hard ice. De-pantsed Kevin O’Connor behind a bush.

Pom pom pullaway. Hide and seek. Kick the can. Softball in the Statz farm pig pen. Tackle football (no helmets or cups). Never was our play supervised — either at school or home. 

Were we baby boomers lucky? Our book club is reading The Anxious Generation. “How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” by Jonathan Haidt. Blaska is reading The Atlantic magazine article he wrote, instead. A shorter read.

 ‘And then we changed childhood’

Unsupervised play apparently ended sometime around the making of the 1979 Dustin Hoffman/Meryl Streep movie, Kramer versus Kramer. But the advent of smartphones a dozen years ago “is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood,” Haidt argues. “Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults.”

Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play. One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate.” 

Play, exploration, and intense socializing were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. And then we changed childhood. — Jonathan Haidt

Haidt reports that by 2022, one-third of teens said they were on one of the major social-media sites “almost constantly.” Young people interacted with other people face-to-face only 67 minutes a day. “Their phones are pinging constantly …  237 notifications a day.” Depression and anxiety rose by more than 50% from 2010 to 2019. Suicide up 48% for adolescents ages 10 to 19. Haidt reports fragmented attention spans and disrupted learning.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: is amazed that young children have their own smartphones. Back in the day, we yearned for that box of 64 crayons with the built-in sharpener. Mass school shootings were unknown. St. Ambrose school in Madison collects student phones first thing in the morning and returns them at the end of the day after chapel.

Should more schools prohibit smart phones?