AS A DOTING FATHER OF MY BELOVED CHILDREN, A HEARTFELT PLEA ON BEHALF OF ALL CHILDREN
This season is a time when children’s eyes shine bright, and their comments and hopes refresh the tired adult world with innocence. The brutal realities with which they are all too often faced, lose focus, and are replaced by the dreams and fantasies of their inventive minds, encouraged by the cultural accouterments that society provides.
Yet, I am fearful.
Constantly I am aware of lonesome children lagging
beside or behind their parents who are consumed by their screens. In buggies,
at tables, on public transport and in queues, there they are, silent companions
to their adult chaperones, whose fingers are tapping, as frenetically as their
eyes are darting.
Worse still, to overcome the guilt of their adult
addictive behaviour, parents introduce the screen drug to their unsuspecting
offspring in the early reaches of their lives.
Being together as a family, walking, or eating or
stopping for a drink is when the silence falls and each member muddles along,
even tiny tots in buggies, hardly able to walk, yet with screen in hand, being
allured into a virtual world, as the real one is denuded of its potency.
Within this numbing manipulation, driven by the large
tech mammoths, whose profits and power make them unelected, unaccountable major
influencers, we are losing our connection and appreciation of life.
Butterflies, sunrises, garden foxes, winter frosts and
the multiple glories of nature hold little appeal. Conversation, facial
expression, atmosphere, respect and consequence have all become disassociated
and replaced by anonymity, vile trolling, pouting and pretending, vaunting and
vanity, bullying and attrition.
More sinister still is the direction of a person’s
attention, targeted away from what is cast as their prosaic existence, to what
purports to be superior, lodged often in some celebrity, or social media
entrepreneur, whose Instagram, Facebook, You Tube or other platform, greedily consumes and predates the lives of
their followers and exchanges them for a transitory, artificial and delusive fabrication.
The trickery invites an incremental descent into
farce, where the followed have to devise increasingly bizarre antics to
maintain their market share, and the public are intoxicated into believing that
this merry-go-round has a vital relevance to their lives.
Beside them of course, may well be their partners, unique
human creations, with whom they are unfurling their lives and realising their
dreams; as well as their children, inexpressibly wonderful expressions of love,
miracles of hope, wide eyed and utterly dependent upon them, or they may be single,
oases of individuality, working out their own lives’ trajectory, embarking on a
journey, never undertaken before by any other.
However, these realities pale into insignificance, in
the face of the screen onslaught, and become inconvenient and awkward
interruptions, to be irritably brushed aside.
I want to try to help stop this rot.
I want to celebrate what is normal, mundane and
everyday.
I want to expose the screen and virtual world as the imposter it really is, so worthless, vacuous and pointless.
I want most of all to celebrate children.
In my understanding, there is nothing on this earth,
comparable in value and significance to children.
They are our diamonds, making us the wealthiest people
in existence.
You may live in penury, but if you are fortunate
enough to have a child, to have contact with a child in your wider family or
through your work, or just as a neighbour, you are a trillionaire and more.
A mother and a father are entrusted with this
treasure, that should make them ever breathless with wonder. Often that awe is
experienced at their child’s birth and in the subsequent days of their tiniest
beginnings. It is though, a wonder that should span their entire childhood and
beyond.
Life and adulthood expose them to multiple influences
and choices that, as Kahlil Gibran wrote so eloquently, take them on their own
paths, yet they remain forever nestled in the parent’s heart.
In the overwhelming pressures of parenthood and the
search of young adults for identity and economic stability, the magic and
incomparable significance of childhood can be threatened. The screen then
allures, with its instant gratification and illusion of perfection, in stark
contrast to an odious nappy, a toddler's tantrum or a contrary adolescent.
Yet, in the vicissitudes of childhood, the complexity
of establishing a home and the intimacies of family life, lie such rich seams
of gold that they expose the world of social media as the worst form of
impersonation and fraud.
Writing as a father, and as a man, who has been
privileged and fortunate to have experienced so many things in my life, I can
conclude that the most extraordinary, astonishing and fulfilling part of my
life has been accompanying my children through their childhoods.
Each child has been unique, utterly their own person,
discovering and unfolding their destiny. Cherishing them from their first
breaths and uncurling and throughout the days of their maturation, has been
indescribably sublime. Every moment remembered, replayed, relived, an Aladdin’s
cave of joys, constantly re-visited, where delight and happiness prevail.
From the very beginning I wanted to invest my all in
my children and to try to be the very best father for them. I have always
counted each day spent with them a gift, and each practical task undertaken for
them, a blessing. Greater effort brought deeper happiness; imaginative
enterprises, plans and adventures made the days unpredictable and special;
maximising the potential of life was the ultimate quest, realising that with
attention and commitment the ordinary could be transformed into the marvellous.
Why settle for a buggy when you can baby sling babies
close to your heart, or cycle with toddlers, even the 2 of you and a dog on the
same cycle pulling two more in a child bike trailer behind?
Why settle for looking at a tree, when it can be
climbed or for a dry slide, when a wet one with plastic
sheeting can extend the run?
Why settle for a tedious school run when you can walk
and play games together on the way or for a monotonous cloudy inside day, when
you can build an obstacle course in the kitchen with ladders and upturned
tables?
Why settle for looking at the rain when you can lie on
the grass and let it splash all over you or trampoline in swimming costumes in
the snow and then down a steaming hot chocolate?
Why watch other people’s fun, when you can create so
much of your own, from elaborate April Fools tricks, to homespun adventures,
treasure hunts, challenges, competitions, plays and your own made up crazy
games?
I write this to urge parents not to allow your
children’s childhoods to run through your fingertips like sand. Wrest
yourselves away from those beguiling screens and realise that your own lives
are waiting to be energised, excited and expanded by your attention and
creativity.
You want to make your own existence far more dazzling
and fabulous than anything you can find on a screen and when you do, don’t be
sucked back by the jealous internet, to think you should publicise and monetise
your fantastic lives. No. The most fantastic lives are kept mainly private.
Thinking you have to have followers and an audience
denudes your world of its rare and remarkable grace and monetising it, cheapens
intimacy into a commodity that extracts its magic.
Some people complain that parental love is not
reciprocated and that investing everything in a child may reap no enduring
benefit. As adults, having flown the nest, they may return rarely, care little
and leave their parents, even when elderly and infirm, to fend for themselves with
no or little help. Jesus even warned that some children would rise against
their parents and have them put to death, but he also warned that it would be
better to be bound with a heavy stone and cast into the sea, than to harm a
child.
A parent should offer their child, as every person
should offer every child, that rare expression of love that is unconditional.
It looks for no return, no benefit and no reward. A love that flows from their
heart as an expression of the calibre and commitment of them as a parent and as
a person. The depth and quality of their love defines them and is their finest
legacy upon the earth.
This season is a chance to re-evaluate and realise
just how precious are your children and all children.
Watch them, not your screens. Talk to them, not some
distant texter. Create adventures and make plans with them, rather than looking
at the antics of others. Illuminate and transform your world, rather than be
absorbed into the meaningless screen masquerade, that is a pale imitation of
the real, so that your children, and all the children with whom you have
contact, will plunge eagerly into life, rather than an electronic tomb of
ghosts.
As parents, realise that, in the totality of a lifespan,
you have so very few years with them, when you cradle their hearts in their
tiny becoming years. Time filled with unsurpassed magic that bejewels the path
taken. Unforgettable experiences shared and the indescribable happiness known
in beholding the blossoming and emerging of a person, you have been privileged to
play your part in creating.
Thankfully our home still harbours our youngest and
pulses with the heartbeat of his life and thankfully too our older children,
though at University, return regularly and the house hums with their
extraordinary energy. The love we all have for each other is breath taking in
its natural sincerity and is, I believe, the result of our family life, where
screens, though well used, have never taken pride of place and where we have
lived life to the full, as a family, cherishing our days together, and
maximising the potential for good, hope and life.
posted by Bishop Jonathan Blake | 7:32 PM
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