Parents today fret about iPads frying kids’ brains. Experts warn of attention spans shortened by screens, of developmental delays and digital addiction.
We recall fondly that past generations of children engaged in wholesome activities. What happened to kids reading books, drawing with crayons, building with blocks, and playing outside until sunset?"
But maybe that lost reality is different from what we remember.
Before iPads, parents weren’t necessarily reading Beatrix Potter to attentive toddlers. Many were putting whiskey on babies’ dummies. They were dosing them with “soothing syrups” containing morphine and alcohol. They were administering barbiturates to keep them quiet. They were telling them to go play on the railway tracks or in abandoned buildings – almost anywhere out of earshot.
The brand name “Mother’s Little Helper” wasn’t coined for iPads. It was for Valium, which many mid-century mothers took to cope with the stress of child-rearing, often while their children were parked in front of television sets for hours.
There’s a strange sense in which parents have always sought ways to pacify their children. The methods change, but the impulse remains.
The hard part is that alongside this timeless parental quest for quiet runs a curiously more modern phenomenon: a growing intolerance of children in public spaces.
Adults-only restaurants proliferate. Housing developments ban residents under 18. Airlines create child-free zones. Social media celebrates “child-free” weddings, holidays, and lives. The mere presence of children in public spaces – even well-behaved ones –increasingly provokes disproportionate outrage.
The baby bind
There’s something perverse and profoundly contradictory about condemning parents for using digital pacifiers while also demanding that children be neither seen nor heard in collective spaces.
We don’t want to see breastfeeding in public. We don’t want children within earshot. And we’re deathly scared of the bottomless hole that having kids seems to open in our wallets.
I often join the crusade against iPad babies, but the public intolerance of children increasingly necessitates them. We love sonogram photos and gender reveals. We watch TikTok videos of kids doing funny things in other people’s homes. But we rarely want them in our own.
It’s a peculiar bind: expecting parents (and teachers) to raise perfect children without the modern tools available to them, while simultaneously stripping back the community structures that once made child-rearing manageable.
We once understood that raising kids was a collective endeavour. Extended families shared the load. Neighbours watched out for each other’s children. Communities created spaces where children could be noisy, messy, and unpredictable without apology.
But now, we’ve privatised parenting. Each individual household is alone responsible for their children’s behaviour, development, and future prospects. It seems ridiculous that a group of parents might band together to subsidise provisioning childcare, education or entertainment for their kids as one, instead of individually paying for all their kids to do the same thing.
The iPad isn’t the first parenting crutch, nor is it likely to be the last. The more interesting question isn’t whether screens are “bad” for children, but why we’ve created societies where children’s natural behaviours are pathologised.
Catatonic children staring slack-jawed at bright colours isn’t a new phenomenon, as much as I enjoy rallying against digital lobotomisation. But to fix the problem, we may need to look further upstream and consider what real, viable alternatives we’re creating for enriching the lives of children.
Which children will play together when playgrounds are banned and deemed too unsafe? Which children will read when public libraries are shuttered in favour of Kindle collections? Which children will share secrets and sleep over when none of their parents are trusted friends? Which children will wander, interact, and find their adult voices when we demand they be kept safe in mollifying quietude?
What if iPad babies are the only babies we leave room for?
The incels, gender wars, birthing crises and loneliness epidemics all seem downstream of the compartmentalisation and privatisation of child-rearing.
We wish today’s children knew what we knew, but without the social context in which we learnt it. We wish that today’s children would do as we did, without being willing to scaffold and socialise it.
For how long will we adults be afraid of the dark? When will we leave our comfort zones and try new things? When will we go outside and play, and make friends? It seems we’ll have to grow up if we finally want our kids to.
