If you smoked heavily inside the house in the same room as your asthmatic toddler…
If you left your loaded firearm within reach of your depressed adolescent child…
If you shot up heroin in the presence of your young child…
If you drove your car with a belly full of grog and your children unrestrained…
If you engaged in exhibitionist sex in the presence of your children…
If you encouraged your underage child to join you in heavy drinking or drug taking…
If you were unable to control your anger, if you belted your spouse, if you treated your child violently…
you probably wouldn’t be surprised to win the disapproval of the Authorities.
Any penalty would not astonish.
If the child were removed from your care you’d get it.
Why, if your face is buried always in your phone while your child needs your presence, your care, your engagement –
– should you be surprised if Child Protection intervened?
Of course that intervention won’t occur.
Working at the children’s hospital, walking in the streets, travelling on the train, I see a generation of adults outsourcing parenting to the i-pad.
I see adults, adolescents and children engaging not with each other but with the screen.
I see human connection attenuated and distorted.
I see and I worry.
Perhaps I see too much.
howardgoldenberg 
Don’t lose hope. Our daughter and son-in-law do not use their phones while looking after their son, our grandson. He knows about phones and they will take photos/videos of him, but they never phone anyone or check their phones or communicate with others in his presence. He is a happy, engaged, responsive, mad-about-words-and-books sixteen-month-old.
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Bless him!
Bless his parents!
I suspect your descendants must have absorbed ideas from their parents
Enjoy that flourishing mind, Hilary
HG
The other one
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You’re not on your own Howard. I often want to say something as well, when I see the same things as you.
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I can just see you with your soft motherly heart busting to cry out to save some stranger’s child, Janette
The tenderest hearted are the easiest hurt
Thank you for writing
Xx
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You see exactly what it is and unfortunately it has come to that. Recently I was in a store and could hear loud voices from a kids cartoon. I looked around and there it is. A six months old baby lying in a pram with the Ipad literally stuck to the top of the pram. He wasn’t even blinking. That child had no emotion on his face. It was like looking at a mini robot and I so wanted to speak to those people and ask what on earth are doing to their child but I couldn’t cause I am only one person frustrated by the way children are raised.
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Very disturbing report
We are shrinking the brains of all generations – mine, the young, the kids, the bubs
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