Childhood in the Networked Age: the Challenge of Relationship
This brief essay is excerpted from my regular newsletter, Capita Ideas. Subscribe here.
Recently a friend remarked to me that we are “more connected and less relational” than we have ever been. The ubiquity and accessibility of networked devices has ensured that we are never disconnected from the cell towers and GPS satellites that invisibly structure our world today. While we are highly connected, it is also clear that we are alone, often in pain, and in few meaningful relationships. Yet as Jean Bethke Elshtain remarked “we are born for relationship and community.” Born for them. Being born for them means that our lack of relationship and community is not merely the absence of some amenities of a prior age for which we are nostalgic but without which we can now live. It is the absence rather of something constitutive to who we are as persons.
I think about the decline of relationship in light of the core story of early childhood development. The science of early childhood brain development seems to suggest a convergence of scientific and philosophical knowledge confirming that we are born for relationship. Meaningful reciprocal and responsive relationships with caregivers are necessary for flourishing in the first five years of a person’s life. They not only drive better outcomes in school, improve vocabulary, and promote better physical and mental health long into adulthood, but they also awaken in us our capacities to wonder, to hope, to interpret the world around us, to love, and more. These are capacities not measureable in a scientific sense, but which complement the scientific knowledge on early childhood development advanced over the last several decades.
My reading recently about technology and relationships has led me to rethink how we frame discussions about the early years of life and technology. Adam Greenfield writes that “networked digital information technology has become the dominant mode through which we experience the everyday.” Therefore, we must deepen our understanding of how this dramatically changed experience of the everyday is impacting parents, other caregivers, and children and what practices we must develop to ensure priority for sustaining and nurturing relationships in the lives of both adults and children. This will require more than mere technological asceticism, but a scientifically informed and philosophically grounded discussion of human happiness and restlessness, relationship and community, the wonder and possibility of childhood, the responsibilities and cultural expectations of parenting, and the practices required to sustain relationality and sociality in a digitally networked age.
In Love Alone is Credible, Hans Urs von Balthasar captures the mystery of relationship in the earliest days of person’s life- the mystery that we must always steward and preserve- this way:
After a mother has smiled at her child for many days and weeks, she finally receives her child’s smile in response. She has awakened love in the heart of her child, and as the child awakens to love, it also awakens to knowledge: the initially empty-sense impressions gather meaningfully around the core of the Thou.
On this topic, I have recently read the late University of Chicago political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Who are we? Critical Reflections and Hopeful Possibilities, Adam Greenfield’s Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, and Marc Auge’s The Future.
