There’s a particular silence in the house when the kids are on their devices. Not the quiet of reading, which includes the gentle interruption of muttered words and the turning of pages. Not the concentration of Lego, which brings with it the snap of bricks or the ripping of plastic. Not the open-mouthed gape at the telly, which is always, always on too loud.
No, devices — or tablets in particular — often bring a suspicious calm. It’s quiet — too quiet. The house sounds empty. There are no feet hammering up and down the stairs. There are no thuds on the floors or slams of doors. There’s no fighting. No messing.
It’s the sound of children fully escaping into whatever world is in that device and, more often than not, hoping they won’t be caught.
Experience tells me that the noise changes in time, depending on the device in hand. There is the full roar and giddiness of the Xbox. There is the shout of a child joining friends via a headset. There is the zombified gawp of someone standing still, mid-step, staring at a phone.
(That last one, especially, is not exclusive to the kids, of course. That’s any of us. Me for sure. Enough that my children mimic it. “It’s work,” I insist, closing Twitter.)
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There is the sound of one side of a conversation being shouted down the microphone on a headset. You walk into a room with an Xbox, PlayStation or a Switch being played and you don’t know if it’s just you and the young player in the room or if there are half a dozen people listening in.
Everything you say might be broadcast live across the county. You become like a politician all too keenly aware of the dangers of a microphone. “Are you on mute?” you say. “Can I speak in my own house?”
To which the answer, in the main, is no.
Now, perhaps you live in some household Eden, an early 1990s-type scenario where you have kept the internet and its many tools out of the hands of your growing kids. Their attention spans might still be intact, their brains unsullied, their demands simple. And well done if you have managed that. I gave up on that idyll long ago.
I’ve seen families of four at restaurant tables, each of them staring at a screen, the youngest in a high chair, tablet propped up in front of him in one of those hard, colourful cases. He picks off the chips while watching Peppa Pig. The parents flick through their phones. I have judged them. Of course I have. But then I cop on to myself, because who knows how much they need that few minutes of quiet, of calm. It mightn’t be my approach to a family dinner, but we’re on the same spectrum. We’ll give the kids the tablets for, say, a long drive and hope that distraction trumps the car sickness.
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The devices are taking over in our house but we try to hold back the flood as long as possible. The three youngest don’t have phones and won’t for a while yet. We manage their screen time, or at least try to. We’ve installed the apps and the safeguards, checked the histories, discouraged the streaks, checked the ads they’re shown, and refused the games’ endless demands for payment.
Still, I complain and fret about the impact of it all. I wonder aloud how they’ll ever be able to hold their attention on something for longer than a minute. I imagine the surgeons of the future, standing over a chest cavity, mindlessly scrolling through their phone until they realise they’re drooling on an open heart and better get back to work for another 30 seconds.
I wonder how they’ll focus because I can hardly manage it these days and, buried below 20 years of swiping and clicking, my brain has some actual experience in the long-lost skill of focusing on a task without the distraction of a nearby phone.
And even as I write this the kids are back from school and the noise of dropped bags, the hunt for food and the chats have gradually fallen silent. I recognise that quiet. It’s time to close off this computer and go drag them away from theirs for a while.
