On Telephones That Do Not Work

[avevale_intelligencer]

Glancing out of the kitchen window, I happened to see a child of about seven or eight walking past, talking earnestly into a mobile phone; and it occurred to me that when I was about seven or eight, it would have been a toy telephone (and not a mobile either), but that this one was almost certain to be a real, functional one. And I was overcome by a wave of sadness, not because I had never had a real telephone when I was seven or eight, but because this child had probably never had a toy one.

So great is our hurry to push, pull, drag, throw, bully and cajole children into adulthood these days that we give them all the things we have, and we make sure they work. I have seen little petrol-driven go-karts for the use of toddlers (under supervision, please gods), make-up sets for three-year-olds, computers for babies who have not learned to spell yet, and possibly never will. It can surely only be a matter of time before we start palming off our less pleasurable work on them, and then we will have come full circle; only instead of sending children down the pit or up the chimney, we will sell their eager parents the Kiddy Kall Centre, complete with real telephone on which real customers can call up and arrange their car insurance with Damien, aged six.

I had a car when I was a child. It was blue, and it worked by pedals, and I had a lot of fun with it, and I learned that one's speed is directly proportional to the effort one puts in, a valuable life lesson it took me a long time to unlearn. If it had had an engine, I would have been terrified; but even more disastrously, I would have been deprived of the fun of pretending it had an engine. I also had a toy telephone. It was red, and plastic, and in due course I took it apart and added ping pong balls and turned it into a robot as you do; but before that I had derived far more pleasure from pretending to talk to people on it than I could ever have got from actually talking to people. For one thing, the range of opportunities for conversation is so much wider when one is talking to oneself, on a telephone that does not work.

Similarly, I cannot help but think that if the parents in the excellent song "Mommy, Can I Have A Spaceship?" had presented their preschool child with a fully functioning interstellar probe vessel, the song would have ended rather differently, and possibly much sooner; and the child, if he survived, would very likely have gone to work in a bank instead. The benefits to be gained in childhood from games of "pretend" are too many and various to be listed here, but most of them may be summarised under one general head; the freedom to exercise the imagination to the full in the knowledge that one is safe from the consequences of one's mistakes.

These days are different, of course. No-one is safe, the hedges are heaving with paedophiles, and it is vitally important that a child should be able to call for help on a real phone, zoom off in a real Formula 1 racing car, or in the extreme blow away its assailant with a real Walther PPK. There is no time for games of "pretend." Life is real, life is earnest, and life starts when you learn to walk. The child I saw through the window was probably contacting her broker to adjust her investment portfolio in the light of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. But I cannot escape the thought that she might have found it more pleasant, and possibly even more educational, if she had been talking to the man in the moon, on a telephone that did not work.

Comments

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Well, to be fair, one is as withdrawn from the world when talking to oneself on a toy telephone as one is with an iPod. I think children need some time away from the world in order to learn how to deal with it. But of course, it should be clear that that is what it is. Watching telly, on an iPod or whatever, gives one the fact of withdrawal with the illusion of connection, which is not good.

[lutos.livejournal.com]

Watching the television or the iphone is also very passive, while talking to an imaginary friend on your plastic phone is an active process of fantasy. Huge difference, in my eyes.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Probably. When I was young, as I remember it, my parents made very little distinction between the two kinds of activity; neither was "real." I was never discouraged from watching telly or playing games with my imagination, but it was a matter for concern for them that I spent so much time "in my head" and not in the "real" world. I suppose some of that attitude must have rubbed off on me. I think the idea that an active process of fantasy was a good thing came along a lot later.