You’ve Aways Got Your Nose Stuck in a Book.

That was my mother’s constant complaint/observation/criticism of me. It depended on how much she needed help and of course it wasn’t until I had children of my own and a house to run that I understood her problem with me.

And it was totally justified. I had books by my bed, always brought a book to the meal table and crammed every spare moment with reading. I was, however, a little miffed when Christmas came around and I got books from my grandparents and other relatives, rather than sweaters or games, but I came to love all those books and to read and re-read them all. To this day Jane Eyre and Little Women are my comfort books and A Tale of Two Cities is my ultimate thriller. It says a lot that I brought so many of my books with me across the Atlantic and I having been giving them away to my grandchildren in the hope they too will cherish them.

I do not remember my parents reading to me. I hope they did; we certainly tried to pass our love of reading on to our children. It was the age of Where the Wild Things Are and Dr. Seuss (neither of us was especially fond of the latter, although we thought we were supposed to be.) Our children all have memories of the books we shared with them and have become extensive readers. But their children are grown up in a vastly different age. Parents are facing the siren song of the world of technology.

I've read the articles about the bad effects of allowing children to spend too much time on-line and I have heard my grandchildren telling me that their computer time is rationed. There are a couple of TV commercials which show draconian mothers cutting off signal so the family can eat together (though in one case, when they do they seem to be standing around a table grabbing slices of pizza.) There are stories of the dangers of children not inter-acting with each other or engaging in physical activity interspersed with the accounts of how the writer spent his childhood happily playing with a stick and a ball of string. I tended to agree.

Then last week I read an article by Christopher Mims in The Wall Street Journal, which began, "Imagine someone traveling through time to the days before the internet, regaling audiences with fantastical tales of a future in which children can access devices containing the sum of all human knowledge and which gain new powers daily to instruct, create and bring people together.

Now imagine this time traveler describing the reaction  of most parents to the devices—not celebration, but fear, guilt and anxiety over how much time children spend with them.”

You can see where this is going. An exhortation backed up by a recommendation by the American Association of Pediatrics to distinguish between different types of screen use—say FaceTime with Grandma versus a show on You Tube. (Grandma’s not going to win that one!) There were lots of statistics and articles by learned psychologists, all leading to the claim that the intelligent use of different types of technology can be beneficial. Now another guilt trip for parents deciding how to pit Grandma against Dora the Explorer, though I feel any parents worth their salt can, and have been, instinctively making good choices.

For me, the source of the sum of all human knowledge was a battered copy of an ancient Pears Encyclopedia which I read from cover to cover. Several times. I learned foreign words and phrases, the flags of all the countries. My Pears would never gain "new powers daily" to update their names from the Belgian Congo or Rhodesia. Let’s not even mention Sri Lanka. 

So the more things change, the more they stay the same. If I were growing up today my mum would be saying,  “You’ve always got your nose stuck in a computer."