Remember Your Why

What do you do when your children ask too many questions? Maybe it’s natural curiosity; maybe it’s for a school project; maybe they’re concerned about something they’ve heard, and they’re looking for guidance, reassurance, or just verbal contact with you.
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Well, these days you don’t have to do anything, it seems, because you can get a chatbot to do the job for you. Speech recognition software means that as soon as a child is able to speak fluently, the robot can answer all their questions, play their choice of music, tell random jokes and carry on an exchange of words that sounds very similar to a conversation. The Parents of the Future will hardly need to speak with their offspring any more, except to tell them when their chicken nuggets are ready. Pretty soon, the microwave will probably take over that role too, and parents will be able to go whole weeks without interacting with the small humans they brought into this world.

Once they accomplish this, they’ll find it’s a one-way street. There is no way back. The robot has “infinite patience” with inconsistent demands and inconsiderate/abusive behaviour, so parents will find that any interpersonal contact with their children has now become so unpleasant that they can only go and invest in further technology to maintain the distance.
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The Parents of the Future will appreciate how much time the devices are saving, for by now the school will be pursuing them with all sorts of ridiculous and time-consuming requests. Admin want to set up meetings regarding the children’s demanding/disruptive tendencies. So unreasonable! Clearly the schools have failed to gear up for the Children of the Future yet: children accustomed to getting everything that they want at home (except for human contact). If a child is aggressive or attention-seeking, maybe it’s the school’s fault for failing to accommodate their big emotions? Time to go out and buy additional technology, including an AI that will complete all homework without any living person needing to look at it. This will mean working extra hours to afford it all, but at least the Parents of the Future don’t have to waste any valuable time interacting with their children. 

As the children grow up, there will be concerns over their academic scores, their mental health, their futures. Maybe the kids just need more individually-tailored support—counselling apps, self-regulation coaching apps, emotional validation apps?—but nothing seems to work. What is going wrong? The Parents of the Future have done everything they could possibly think of. It has to be the school’s fault, the mental health services, all of society...

OK, I’m not saying every family who buys an AI device is headed for disaster, but I meet too many children who are not thriving mentally and emotionally, and who would do better with less technology and more face-to-face parenting. Meanwhile, I see too many parents on social media praising the convenience of chatbots in their homes: an instant and effortless answer to every question, giving them an easy way to disengage from their child’s developing mind. One or two other parents complain that chatbots don’t always supply the right answers for homework tasks, but everyone seems confident that a tweak here and there will finally free parents from the onerous necessity of any meaningful interaction with their children.
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I was going to talk about the devaluation of learning, when questions receive instant answers, answers are instantly forgotten, and there is never any need to remember anything or join knowledge together into a coherent perspective. I was going to talk about the poor quality of chatbot responses: stock answers, contradictory assertions presented as fact, hidden biases. I was going to talk about the lack of any relevant model of knowledge-seeking: the missing stages of finding out, reasoning and evaluating. The value of a parent admitting to the boundaries of their own knowledge, setting an example of lifelong learning. 

But the biggest loss when we use robots to replace parental involvement is relational, emotional, psychological.

You know how they tell burnt-out teachers to “remember your why”? The idea is that if teachers remind themselves why they entered the profession to begin with, they will be better equipped to withstand the rising tide of harassment and abuse children feel entitled to throw at them. Well, I think the Parents of the Future need to be asked to “remember your why”. Why did they have children? Did they really envision working harder and harder to pay for the material demands of a brood of strangers with psychiatric issues?

Didn’t we all kind of hope that we would know and love our children, and that they would know and love us? That when they reached teenage they would still look us in the eyes and tell what they’re thinking? That when they develop a sarcastic sense of humour or they want to comment on our driving skills they will make eye contact to be sure they’re not being too harsh? That doesn’t happen automatically.

I made a deliberate decision, when my sons were little, to work part-time. To dress them in other children’s cast-offs and buy books and gifts secondhand. To make them choose between taking the bus home from town, or buying the snack they wanted and then walking home. Both children were perfectly comfortable with this. It was other people who weren’t. For years the women at church were busy comparing notes on what a terrible mother I was, refusing to provide for my children. But my first son had told me, “Mummy, God thinks Mummy-time is more important than money,” and I chose to assume he knew God better than they did.

I get that not everyone is free to make all the same choices. Circumstances change, and life gets expensive. However, I will say that life only gets more expensive if the children are not OK, and they won’t be OK if most of the attention they crave comes from robots.
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We don’t all have the same level of financial privilege, but can we agree to normalise face-to-face interaction with our children? At the very least, can we agree not to brag about how much of the parent-child relationship we’ve managed to turn over to AI chatbots?