Our Children's Lives, Online

From our book Severed Conscience

This article is combination of material from our newly published book Severed Conscience and new material based on research we recently reviewed regarding “Sharenting”. My co-host Orange wrote of the practice in the concluding chapter of our book, and an article from Psychology Today made us revisit the concept of living a life online. Since it is graduation season for many high school, middle and elementary schools and with kids now on a summer schedule, we thought it appropriate to ask how you plan to spend your summer life with your child, and what motivations could be for posting pics of your child online.

What does the British East India Company have to do with how we raise our kids? First let me describe what I see as a disturbing new norm, then I’ll tie in the historical parallels to the title. “Education is fundamental to sustaining an advanced society.” That is the mantra we have had drilled into us for decades, no society can function without it in the modern world.

And we have adapted our lives to that concept as we have formed milestones and rituals around the 13 years we require kids to go to school.

In fact one argument against homeschooling I constantly heard was “you kids will be isolated, and school is a big part of their normal socialization” when we decided to homeschool ourselves. Our job was to find like minded families because it is true, kids need friends, family structure, social outlets and ways to experience the real world.

When COVID came along, what happened to that philosophy? It pretty much evaporated out of convenience to support the theory that isolation was critical to the survival of our society. Amazing when you think about how quickly we adapted the practice of keeping our children in complete isolation. Not only without friends but literally masking them and sequestering them from the world with reminders of “you may be sick and not know it – you don’t want to endanger grandpa, do you?” And it happened uniformly across the planet.

Think about just prior to COVID and your child’s experience in school. They engaged, they laughed, they had school plays, they got knocked down on the playground.

There was an online component that worried us parents, but their daily life meant they left the house and had to get in the mosh pit of real life with other kids and figure things out for themselves. Education required isolating our kids from our supervision, but we were assured that we had a system that would educate our children.