Is social interaction shifting to a non-contact sport? The more I observe my kids the more I wonder about the future and how people will interact as we move forward. My five boys are very different, but without being forced to, they each fall back into a near purely online engagement with the world. This isn’t about COVID. It is likely that the pandemic exacerbated an existing condition. My boys won’t leave the house unless required. They have all they need on their screens. I have one who went away to college and he’s been experiencing an entirely different social life than the others. He’s hardly online in comparison to the others. He spends every day hanging out with friends and exploring and playing in RL. The two high school boys only experience the outside world as a result of being in school. The other two, both college students hardly ever leave the house. The one who doesn’t work only leaves for the handful of classes he takes, and doesn’t really interact with people in person. He interacts online and on his terms.
I think that is the key to my concerns here. These boys are all learning to interact with the world on their terms. They don’t want to leave the comfort zone and be challenged – even the ones who are out in the world are experiencing it in their comfort zone. I’ve predicated my parenthood on making sure my kids are more comfortable than I was as a kid and that comfort made them complacent. I don’t know what steps I need to take to break them of that, but I do want to try.
Some Thoughts:
- On a side note, I found myself in a high school classroom and I saw two students plop bags down next to each other and they were the same exact (and not common) bag. Later they accidentally switched bags. What makes that interesting to me is that I have a student whose screenplay is built on that premise, and I’d been really uncertain about whether or not that old school switch would hold up, but dang. I saw it in real time, and it totally does.