For his sake, I hope not. Nothing is more depressing than knowing that I still have 30 years of sitting at a computer for eight or nine hours a day – I get to spend the best part of every day (okay, five out of seven) of my prime years in a chair staring at a monitor. Sometimes I envy those in construction or landscaping. I’m hopeful that, by the time he’s ready to enter the workforce (and sometime before I retire), technology advances to the point where we don’t have to sit all day. I’m holding out for one of those treadmill-style workstations. Or some kind of virtual technology that lets me do my spreadsheets while I’m weeding…
C, much to our chagrin, has taken quite an interest in technology. No wooden blocks or stuffed animals for him – he wants cellphones, laptops, and the TV remote. On the one hand, I want him to play with Legos and fight imaginary battles like I used to, and to build forts during the summer, when we were outside from just after breakfast until just before dinner – no TV or video games. On the other, he’s part of a new generation where technology will be entirely second nature because he grows up with it (and he’ll most likely need to learn how to use it for whatever his future career may be). I’m a baby of the 80’s, so I’m part of the first batch that really grew up with computers (challenging my dad to Tetris and Jezz-ball high scoring contests!), and it probably has given me some advantages over my older co-workers who did not. His case is even more pronounced – kids born now will be exposed to so much more than we could have expected even five years ago. Hot technology in my day was a VCR, Walkmans, and Super Nintendo.
In any case, S and I certainly can’t shelter him from all the techie stuff; nor do I think we should. We just want to make sure he’s well-rounded, and knows how to dig a hole, and kick a ball, and start a fire (okay, not for a few years), and climb a tree, and do it all in the real world, not virtually.
Parenting soapbox done.
I like the irony in that he has a desire to play with cell phones and pound a keyboard when you and I would gladly ditch the computer and tech in order to build a few lego sets. I’m admittedly a huge technofile and all around gadget fan, and yet I definitely agree with your desire for not just a well-rounded C, but a well-rounded generation. Funny though how all it does is make us sound like our parents and grand-parents. “Well back in my day…”