Dreft

I’ve kept a Tuesday afternoon that smells like Dreft.

Perhaps more accurately, I have kept a memory of an afternoon from a few years ago, when Ellyana was a toddler. It was a bright day, early spring, too chilly to go outside. She had a slight fever and couldn’t go to daycare, and it was my turn to stay home with her from school.

We spent at least an hour that afternoon reading books. We played Memory Match and My Little Ponies; she fell asleep in my arms watching TV. I turned off the television and held her for a long, long time. The world, on that afternoon, was a very good place.

That day and others like it often bubble up in my mind whenever I smell laundry that has been washed with Dreft detergent, designed to be safe for sensitive skin. My plan is to smuggle a small bottle of it into the nursing home when I get old.

Speaking of getting older, Ellyana turned nine last month, and I was reminded of a National Geographic article I once read that was all about nine-year-olds. Dozens of children from all walks of life were interviewed and asked questions about what they wanted to do with their lives, nine being, the story suggested, the “twilight of childhood.” I found the article quaint when I read it and she was seven. Now I’m not for sure where the magazine went.

Much less quaint, a sophomore in my English class recently wrote a research paper about suicide. Although suicide has always been part of the human condition, instances of it have spiked in the last decade or so, particularly among our young people. I asked my sophomores “Why is that? What is different about growing up now?” It was not a rhetorical question, designed to lead them to some forgone conclusion. I really wanted to know what they thought, and so I listened very closely.

“People now are meaner.” One young lady remarked.

“People are just weaker minded nowadays.” A young man explained.

“Different reasons.” The author of the paper began. “Now people can hide behind a smartphone and say the most terrible things that they would never say to your face. It’s constant. It never, ever ends.”

When I was in college twenty odd years ago, I took a lot of pictures. Sometimes my camera—a film camera, obviously—captured images of silly young people doing silly young people things. The photos weren’t all that scandalous, really, especially by today’s “standards,” but they still weren’t pictures to share with your grandmother. If an antic was too stupid, though, I would just pitch it.

Keep it hidden, keep it safe, deep inside your mind and go ahead with your week.

I have often tried to imagine what it is like to navigate adolescence when almost anything you say and do can be digitized, uploaded, and shared with everybody in just a few moments. All the dumb, silly, adolescent stuff you say and do can be permanently recorded. And, even if it isn’t, you still walk around knowing full well that it could be.

For our young people, 1984 has arrived, and Big Brother is sitting behind them in Chemistry.

Our daughter, of course, wants a smartphone. She isn’t getting a smartphone. Not anytime soon.

That isn’t really a solution, though, is it?

I have read at least a half dozen articles in the last year about the dangers of excessive screen time and about the addictive qualities of the apps we keep, software that is actually designed to be addictive.

Years ago, Steve Jobs sat down to an interview with New York Times reporter Nick Bilton just a short while after the launch of the first iPad. Bilton asked him what his kids thought about the device, and in a response that has earned considerable attention since them, Jobs replied,

"They haven't used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home."

In other words, the guy who helped design the device didn’t really design it to be a toy. He certainly didn’t design it to be a babysitter.

I am not a Luddite, however, and this column is not a diatribe against technology. If you have ever been to my house, you know my own kids spend more time in front of a screen than they should. At the end of the day, gadgets are tools, and, like any tool, they can be used for good or ill. After all, hammers do smash the occasional thumb, but they also build homes.

The purpose of this column, then, is to ask the adults in the room to do everyone a favor: give the kids a break. The world our children are growing up in might share some similarities with the one we remember, but those commonalities are becoming increasingly surface level. The advent of the smartphone and social media is changing the brain chemistry of an entire generation in ways we are only beginning to understand.

Give the kids a break, from their devices, but also from the assumption that they “have it easier” than we did because there is less physical work to be done and we require less physical work from them. Their world might be softer, shinier, more plush around the edges, but it is not easier. There is nothing easy about being called a name online by a few hundred classmates Sunday morning for something you didn’t do on Saturday night; there is certainly nothing easy about wondering if one of your classmates is planning the next mass murder.

            In closing, Dreft is actually kind of pricey, so we’re switching to a less expensive alternative. It probably won’t be as good at conjuring up Tuesday afternoons, but we all have to grow up eventually.

            Nostalgia, too, can be expensive, because we end up trading our moments—our “now”—for polished up memories that merely sit pretty on already cluttered shelves.  For our young people, who have no choice but to grow up now, in these moments, the price for this nostalgia is too high.