Childhood and the use of the screen

Passive play, active play

When a child invents a game with dolls, sticks, objects or with other classmates, he is creating a space where his imagination can develop. I believe that imagination is fundamental in our construction, because I firmly believe that we can became the life that we can dream of - Both in love and in friendship, in different sort of works either scientific, social or artistic, imagination can play a very important role - It leads us to the freedom to create a life that amuses us and we like it, it brings us closer to the freedom to choose and react to the circumstances that surround us - Being creative is being the creator of our lives - Games also allows us to get to know ourselves, discover precisely what speaks to us, what we like - When I interact with boys and girls who spend many hours a day in front of a screen, I realize that there is, in their game, a passive posture. The video, the game, is presented to them, already assembled and invented, and they continue the rules of that game with very little personal participation - It has happened to me to take care of a small group of children for a few days whose screen had been removed - And then I heard things like, "I don't know how to play", "I don't know what to do", "I'm bored", "nothing interests me", "I don't know what I like" - And then I find those children who grow up further away from the screen - This kids design extraordinary games, stories, build and draw their own board games, write stories, make boats and kites, and find in those moments the immense happiness of being entirely in the present moment, with body and mind, and energy put into that moment.

The replacement of literature by video

I love cinema, and watching movies can be extraordinary. I think that after the first years of life, carefully choosing what the child watch, it can be a very rich experience to watch a movie from time to time. I insist on those terms. : choosing very carefully, because the brain of a four-year-old child is not ready to assimilate many images from the cinematographic world. They have to be simple images, with slow editing and soft music, so that the child can enjoy and assimilate them. We must be careful not to get use the young age little ones to the violence that is on the screen. And get used to talk about the movie we watch, so that it is not a product consumed in the moment and anything more- From the movie we watch, we are able to build dialogues and imaginaries - I also insist on the term “from time to time” - A child does not have to watch a video every day - I have observed that when a child has a video or video game every day, the rest of his day becomes disturbingly a boring waiting room. Video cannot be a replacement for dialogue, for games, for creative activities, for rest times, loneliness, and reading times - When we read with our little ones, they are active - They learn language, organize thoughts, expand their vocabulary, and work their imagination to project what they read or hear - Having vocabulary is being able to think further - Being able to organize thought and express oneself is being able to bring those thoughts to our realities - Being able to imagine from words is being able to invent - I have spent many hours with my little ones on roads, in cars, on boats, in places where we did not have internet or videos, and we filled those hours with talks, music, games and also reading. Sometimes parents tell me that their little ones don't read. They only want the screen. And I ask them, do you read? The child observes the environment and copies - If he sees us reading, he also wants to read - I never forced my little ones to read, reading was never an obligation - But I always read them, poetry, stories and then entire novels, because those moments of reading were magical, they united us- One day they started reading alone because they didn't want to wait for me to be available- And even if they are both big readers, we still sometimes gather around a book that I read for everyone-

Consumerism and the screen

I am overwhelmed by the success that hyper-consumerism had in the world, by how it is presented as something seductive and becomes a goal for more and more people. Taking into account how it works, what social and human inequalities it is based on, and what consequences has for the environment; it is amazing that this system, beyond all common sense, continues to grow. I think it is an act of resistance and integrity to avoid spaces of hyper consumption, the attempt to create and buy in second-hand spaces , repairing and reusing what we already have - Avoid the “new”, at all costs –

There is something worrying today about the place that consumerism occupies in the lives of a large number of people - Always more offers, always more products, and what is sold above all this is the idea, the illusion, that when we buy it we will feel happy - All human beings need to feel full, to feel desires that push them, to full feel the desires sometimes - Consumerism plays with that, buying is a “hobby” and if I say that it is an illusion it is that in reality it does not fill any space - After the joy of having bought, the same emptiness sets in and then we want to buy something else - When we manage to find passions in life, we achieve fill that space with something more lasting and that stays with learning and growth. In sport, in art, in creation or reflection, in research, we push our limits a little further forward, we fill ourselves and grow, we learn, we build something in ourselves that has no expiration date, that cannot be stolen or taken away from us.

I met a little while ago a great man, Manu, who is building his mast and his ship, who knows about ships, electricity, engines and welding, who builds robots - Manus told me that he was very bad at school and is only around his 30^th birthday that he understood how to study - And he understood that in the study, in the act of learning there is a lot of frustration, many mistakes, and a tension in the mind concentrated to learn and assimilate something new. He told me that since then he became addicted to that tension, and that he cannot go a single day without learning. “One day without learning it is an empty day,” he told me. I thought it was beautiful how he said it. Goodbye boredom, loneliness, the need for overconsumption and welcome the hours full of personal enrichment, which take you to be capable of what you didn't think you were-

Well, if I talk about all that it is because I feel that the relationship with the screen, since childhood, is worryingly similar to that relationship with consumerism. Children (and adults) “consume” videos. They watch, without discernment, over and over again. Nothing fascinates, nothing surprises, nothing asks the mind to be in tension, nothing teaches to learn in watching video or in the video game - The pleasure is instantaneous and ephemeral, and usually leaves a great void afterwards (quite the opposite of learning that leaves joy and satisfaction) - Putting a child daily in front of a screen is unteach him how to learn, transforming him into a passive subject, and creating in him an addiction to consumerism, to an easy and momentary satisfaction - What a shame, especially when one can observe in babies and kids who grow up without a screen an immense and natural capacity for learning, and an immense curiosity - Innate qualities so valuable for life, it would be worth protecting and feed them, right?

Wonder and poetry

A French photographer said “it is not the wonders that disappear but the ability to marvel” - I really liked that phrase, it spoke to me a lot too - Because one of the daily joys I have is to marvel at something, and even if I have seen a thousand times as the sun rising, or the wind blowing, the flying of some birds, a ray of light on the wall of a city, a look or a moment - I believe that poetry is absolutely fundamental in our lives - Fundamental in our looks- To look at the world with poetry is to see its essence, beyond words - Is to be able to marvel once and once again - The poetic world is the world of all possible - There is where the freedom lies-

I observed in children who live protected from the screen, that their ability to wonder is still there, intact - A magic trick and they laugh out loud, they try to understand how it was done, they want to learn how to do it - A show, and they already want to play it and invent their own piece, an insect, a wave, a stone, a fisherman or a craftsman, and they ask and look and want to learn and be part of it - What a gift to be able to receive life with an always renewed surprise, with laughter always in the corner and the desire always at hand - I have been amazed to see indifference in boys and girls who are in constant relationship with the screen - Nature and the environment in general, no longer produce surprise or tickling, or desire to be there - Everything pales sadly in the shadow of the video or the video game, which so well give us the illusion of being in the fantastic and take away the tools to create fantasies -

Boredom and the screen

There is the argument, always repeated, that children get bored and that is why they are given the screen. It seems strange to me. If when the child is bored we give him the screen, he gets used to filling all empty space with that screen. However, why we should consider that we have to “cover” that boredom? Sometimes my little ones tell me that they are bored - I tell them that it's okay, that if they get bored for a while, they will surely have an idea - Learning to get out of boredom actively is also learning to know oneself, respecting a " times of nothing ", and trust that ideas, reflections, activities can come from those moments. You have to give yourself space and time for thought.-

If we are permanently in the filling of space-time, if we cannot accept those moments of mental wanderings, then how can we move towards the new? This is obviously valid for adults too - Not filling in all the spaces of the day is leaving the possibility of creating new spaces and building them step by step -

Yesterday my daughter complained about boredom - She easily spent an hour looking at the ceiling of her room - And then, without anyone telling her anything, she started organizing the space, took out her notebook and a pencil, and wrote a horror story, laughing that she was scaring herself while she was inventing it - If when she told me she was bored I had put her in front of YouTube, then none of that would have never happened -

The screen and social integration

Another argument that usually comes back a lot is that other children play video games and that it is necessary for your child to also do so to be integrated with others. What do we transmit to the child by accepting that? That to feel good in a group you have to imitate all their actions even if they don't seem healthy to us? That to be accepted and loved you don't have to differentiate yourself? And that it is more important to be accepted in a group with values that do not convince us than to follow their own convictions? Why not try to share with other mothers and fathers that perhaps we should reduce the use of video games? Why not look for or create spaces where children and adolescents can find themselves around other activities? Why not explain to our child that it is true, some children are left many hours in front of the screen, but we consider this is harmful and for their own well-being at home screen use is reduced?

I see, regularly, in restaurants and squares, that adults chat on their side while the children are each sitting in front of a screen. Is that a process of social integration? Being able to share some time between adults and children, inviting them to be part of the talk and to listen to it, to intervene, isn't it a more complete process of social integration than isolating the child on a screen? I have seen my children interact and make friends with people of all ages - I have met girls and boys with whom I have had a great time - Intergenerational exchanges both nourish us and grow all of us -

The day to day aboard the “Tortuga”

On board of “Tortuga” there are screens and onshore we use internet - We use them in a measured way, because there are many very positive things in the existence of computer and internet - Being able to have that tool and use it is fantastic, as long as we are the ones who control it and not it that regulates us - It is very difficult, as adults, to manage to regulate and control that space that is the Internet, so that it does not enter into our privacy, so that it does not occupy all the spaces. It is difficult but totally possible. However, for children it is not. If we leave it to them, children quickly find themselves absorbed by that digital space. That is why we have to protect them and give them tools to develop outside of that space.

Our children have many tools to create themselves, Mael uses “Arduino” platform and makes small electronic objects, he also knots macramé, he likes to make small short films and uses the computer to edit them, he takes photographs and studies chess, electricity, fishing. Oiuna writes poems and stories, plays the guitar and the also the piano, create very long stories with a pair of scissors, or two pencils, clothespins, and sometimes with her toys. They also read a lot.

We watch one or two movies a week, when possible, we choose them, we comment on them - When there is internet we use it so that Mae can play chess online, with friends of him who also play, and he can study games and progress - We also download books, school material, music scores - We usually use the Khan academy page that offers very complete mathematics courses - The screen is there because it is a fantastic tool, but it is not in the center, and its use is conscious -

We have crossed ships with children on board, and talking to mothers and fathers we realized that children who have video games on board are often not interested in the trip they are taking - “They don't go out, they don't want to go to the beach, they don t go for a swim, they don't go fishing” a father told me, a little worry with his 9 and 11 year old children - “Nothing excites them, except being there with their video gamer”_ We also cross boats with children who don't have that on board- So outings are organized by the little ones, they go on adventures to the island near which we are anchoring, they go fishing and jump into the water, they make short films and board games, they prepare recipes and cook. Life vibes and everything smells like that delicious taste of childhood-