I Do Not Like Mondays

Lead image by www.kaboompics.com, Pexels

This past weekend we went to see Disney and Pixar’s Toy Story 5, which is only playing in theaters, and I honestly wasn’t expecting much. Any movie franchise that has reached its fifth iteration stands a pretty good chance of being tired and/or campy, let’s face it.

But fun and funny Toy Story 5 delves into some very real issues that parents must navigate as they try to raise kids today. The first is something like this: when tech moves into kids’ lives, toys are out — and parents bear a lot of the blame.

Actually, it’s more like imaginative play itself goes out the door in favor of kids staring at tablet or phone screens. In the movie, kids get “Lily Pad” tablet smart devices that text, play games, share photos, and more. Once the kids get their Lily Pads, they stare at the screens almost indefinitely in a zombified gaze.

The kids stop being the authors of their imaginative play and make “friends” through group text exchanges and device suggestions. They set up sleepover parties using their tablets.

That’s one of the notable sad moments in the film: the main character, a young girl named Bonnie, who is struggling to make friends, goes to a sleepover, and all the kids do there is continue to stare at their Lily Pad screens. That’s how they spend the whole night, leaving them worn out the next day. Bonnie just feels empty.

As I mentioned, the movie does present the issue as partly (or largely) the parents’ fault, since they’re busy staring at their own device screens and are effectively derelict in parental engagement.

But I was reminded very strongly of what I see as a father of a young girl myself: when my daughter comes home from school or summer camp, she heads straight for that tablet computer and will stare at it for hours and hours on end.

It’s difficult to pry it out of her hands.

Despite controls we put in place with the tablet, including time limits and content restrictions, my daughter often seems to find a way around them. We are certainly to blame at times in letting the use of that tablet — watching and gaming — to substitute for true parental supervision and participation.

Getting back to the movie, it also has a character, Blaze, who’s just a bit older than Bonnie and lives in a more rural setting than the kids in town. Blaze has and rides a horse, and that responsibility and real-world connection with animals seems to extend her ability to play still and use her imagination. Hint, hint.

The film is a notice and warning to parents: watch how you let technology and devices into kids’ lives — it is growing them up faster and robbing them of their childhood and developmental creative play.

In other words, be responsible and be present more as you raise your kids, and let those kids be kids. They’ll be grown up soon enough, and those earlier times of priceless innocence will be nothing but memories.

Also of note, cyber bullying is another theme that’s very clear in Toy Story 5. The couch potato kids locked into using their Lily Pad tablets are quick to gang up on and belittle Bonnie, for example, as she tries to get her toys back after they go missing in a signature zany Toy Story saga of events.

Again, watching the movie as a dad myself, these bullying moments and their effect on the central character Bonnie were heartbreaking.

The takeaways for me amount to some big warning signals regarding kids today and their use of technology and smart devices that we allow. Don’t check out as a parent and just allow unlimited staring at this or that device, often in multiples at a time.

Speaking for myself, I’m from a different era where we very frequently spent our free time just playing outdoors, riding bikes, exploring, doing all kinds of stuff. We lived in a world where we essentially had one foot in analog technology and the real world with the other in digital tech, and we experienced the onset of the present information age.

We were stronger for it, in my view, and more balanced. We were also more social, having real-world play and interactions with other kids instead of just texts and digital/ electronic communications. I hope my wife and I can impart that with my daughter in her upbringing.

There’s a bottom line here: Watch what you let your kids watch and do, and don’t let it just be computer, tablet, and phone screens all the time. Be a strong part of your child’s life — just be there and be present. Don’t fall into the rut of letting overused technology substitute for true parental guidance and teaching.  

And make sure your kids know and experience the real world, not just the cyber or online one. It matters.