The Difference Three Years Makes

In three short years my youngest son went from loving to take walks with me to not loving it so much anymore. What happened?

The last thing I posted—on Thursday, just yesterday actually—was something I wrote during our church’s coronavirus shutdown.  It recounted the fun of taking walks with my nine-year-old son, of seeing a brave, new world through his young, enthusiastic eyes, and a world that took me back to my own boyhood world.

In those short three years since I first wrote that reflection things have changed.  Our national economy faltered and continues to be remade.  One president, who excelled at being provocative, got replaced by one who feels old school, mostly bland and unremarkable, more like his predecessor, President Obama, who created quite a stir by wearing a tan-colored suit.  Putin’s armed forces attacked Ukraine without ever declaring war.  The coronavirus never went away, but continues to contribute to shaping what we increasingly call “the new normal.” 

Also in the space of three years, my youngest child went from being a nine-year-old to becoming a twelve-year-old.  He’s still the same kind, sweet child he’s always been; however, he is no longer as interested in taking walks with his dad, and now, when he does, the experience feels very different.  It’s worth wondering, “What changed?”

If he agrees to go for a walk with me at all, his attention is no longer on the world around him.  Of course, I have changed too in three years.  For me, on the other hand, my attention goes more toward the birds I may hear or may see flit past in the near distance.  If I have my binoculars with me, then I will usually pause long enough to get the bird in view to see what it is.  If I do not have my binoculars, then I will still peer carefully in an effort to make out what it is.  Essentially, I am still perceiving the world we pass as we walk, while for him, in contrast, his interest remains with the world he left behind at home.

I wrote the first reflection three years ago in April, while now it is January.  The streets and sidewalks now are covered with snow and ice, and, frankly, there’s not a lot to see.  Nevertheless, my son likes to explain to me while we walk the games he plays on his Nintendo Switch, which he received from his godparents the Christmas before this last.  He likes to tell me about the main characters and their adversaries, about the weapons he employs to defeat the monsters or monstrous creatures in the game.  He likes to tell me about the skills he attains as he plays the games and learns to be better at playing them.  He has an old dad, sadly, who grew up before video games were popular, and who has no interest in playing them.  Consequently, while I try to be polite and listen, it’s a bit like listening to someone who speaks a language you barely know.  My attention drifts and wanders.  Thank God even for the stray bird.

In the brief course of three years, my son’s interest moved from the natural world to the world of games, a kind of virtual world.  I’ve read articles about how the distinctions have dramatically eroded between “real” world and “virtual” world.  For today’s youth, for example, there may be no distinction at all between the worlds we older folks call “real” and “virtual.”  For young people my kids’ ages, they are the same.  There may be little qualitative difference for them between playing a game of chess at a table with a friend or playing a game of chess on their phones with the same friend from a distance of 1600 miles, as my other son does.  There may be no meaningful difference to them between meeting a friend at a café for coffee or meeting online.

I try not to be dismissive of what feels like significant differences to me between “real” and “virtual” because of how I perceive things.  I try to wrap my heart and mind around the world my children live in, a world in which “real” and “virtual” blend and merge and interconnect, where such boundaries are weak and porous, and of very little consequence indeed.  I have spoken with them about how studies say that people experience a different and improved level of satisfaction in real life, person to person interactions.  They seem skeptical, and they tell me that they have those old world kinds of experiences too.  It’s less a matter of either/or for them, it seems, and more a matter of both/and.  On this matter, I feel skeptical.

I am far more athletic than any of my children and spent a lot more time at their different ages playing sports.  For a better comparison, I might acknowledge that the kind of time they spend on their devices, either playing games or interacting with friends, I spent reading.  Now, if you had told me as a young man that the books of literary fiction I read were not “real,” but “fictional,” then I would have protested.  Indeed, I have met several intelligent men in my life who have told me they never read fiction.  Instead, they prefer non-fiction because it is “true.”  I tell anyone who expresses such an asinine view to me that the truest things I have ever read were actually works of fiction.  Commonly, in my view, truth gets better articulated in works of fiction than works of non-fiction, and you can put that paradox in your pipe and smoke it.

It seems like there may be an enormous amount of wiggle room in notions such as truth, fiction, and reality, just as there may be a great deal of fluidity between notions such as real and virtual worlds.  Isn’t reading a good novel, as I love to do, nothing more than wandering off into an old school virtual world?  Or how is watching a good film not engaging in a virtual activity?  Or what significant differences are there between sitting across a table from someone to converse with them and doing it over the phone, or doing it via a video call?  In this conversation with my children between real and virtual worlds, are any of us right and any of us wrong?  Or are we really talking about things like our own experiences, perceptions, preferments, and the simple satisfaction of our different and diverse needs?

It matters as well in my mind that my son entered middle school this year.  The middle school years mark that period in life when someone, again in my mind, moves outward in an existential and social context, and becomes more differentiated.  These are the first, tentative steps toward building an independent life.  During the elementary school years, there was more of a sense that the child went out into the world always to return to the safe embrace of home and family.  This is still true, of course, and yet those forays into the world feel more like practice runs for the real thing, less like conforming to common law and the requirements of public education.

More and more, my youngest son, like my older children before him, begins to live his own life on his own terms.  His old walks with me, and the joy I found in them, had more to do with his dependence upon me as his parent.  He’s still dependent upon his parents, of course, and yet he is also increasingly less dependent.  And it is vital to his development that he make his own way in the world, even when that means he likely has less interest in taking walks with is old, gray-haired dad, even as his dad’s interest in birds feels like an oddity unique to his dad, and something that may interest him no more than his games interest me.  As an increasingly independent person, my son now has other things he would rather do than go for a walk with his dad.  I believe it’s that simple.

Perhaps part of the trouble with children and parents in these awkward tween and teen years of their kids gravitates around this matter of budding independence.  As our children inhabit worlds apart from us, with interests of their own, acquiring friends whose company they often favor over ours—as these things occur, perhaps we struggle to understand our children, who suddenly feel unfamiliar, and who may also seem like they are putting us aside, as having less value to them, and taking on new interests that implicitly have more value to them. 

In these early years of their independence, many of their favorite activities can feel downright weird to us of other ages and different experiences.  So long as they’re engaged in sports, as we were engaged in sports at a similar age, perhaps their lives feel less alien, more relatable.  Or perhaps we simply feel disappointed—or for some people, betrayed—when they seem to reject those things we valued as younger people and hoped to give them, almost as a bequest.  But if they wander into worlds whose reality we cannot even acknowledge, and so we call them “virtual” worlds because of how we perceive them as being foreign, and certainly not “real,” then perhaps we too are being asinine, like the myopic men I have known who tell me they will not read fiction because fiction is not and evidently cannot be true. 

My mother, when she still had her wits about her, would claim that I am the way I am because I am a Gemini, born under the influence of Mercury.  The Greeks called Mercury Hermes, the messenger god, god of languages, communication, and interpretation.  The literary term “hermeneutics” means  interpretation, in essence, and comes from the Greek verb “to translate,” ερμηνεύω, whose root is the same as for the name of the god Hermes.  I seem always to have had an innate, inborn desire to make sense of things that seemed strange.

In whatever worlds I move I always seek to understand them, to translate them for myself so that I can absorb them and live more like a native, less like an alien.  I learn languages with relative ease, happily try the different foods of different people with different palates.  I want to know and experience as much as I can why one culture values hospitality and another status and another material acquisitions.  I work hard to suppress my biases so that I can expand the size of the world I know.  I am always curious and always hungry to understand new things.

In the case of my youngest child’s newly forming independence, I try to make sense of the world he enters, just as I try to make sense of the worlds my older children inhabit.  I do this simply in order to understand, because, if I can understand better, then I can better approach them in the worlds in which they will live all the same, whether or not I give them my approval.  If I rue my youngest boy’s lack of interest in going on walks with me these days, then it is simply a personal matter, and a matter of grief, for I miss those occasions and the things he taught me about the world I prefer and will always live in.

If I’m honest, then I must admit that I have felt hurt by my children when I attempted to give to them things that I valued so deeply, things that made my young life worth living in the midst of all its youthful anguish.  I don’t know where I would be today, and I can’t fathom the terrible life I would have had, if I had not enjoyed physical activity, nature, and reading lots of good books.  One by one, my children have turned their backs on these things that meant nearly everything to me.  It’s not that they don’t like or do any of these things.  And yet they surely have not received them as I meant to give them, as some of the greatest things in life, and as the greatest gifts I had to give. 

Of course, I must also acknowledge that I am in turn who I am, vastly different from my own two parents.  Have they passed on qualities to me and characteristics that I am pleased to possess?  Yes, of course, while I cannot claim any of their interests as my own either.  And so my children are their own people too, and perhaps the best thing I give them may be that thing they want most in the end, the freedom to be who they are and to become who they will be.  And so I honor their independence, and I encourage them not from a place of judgment and expectation, but from a place where my love endlessly flows toward them in the hope that they find what they want for their own lives.