I'm Raising Digital Natives and I Built the Internet

I have been writing software professionally since 1999. I have built web applications, APIs, databases, mobile backends. I understand how the internet works at a level of detail most people do not need and would not enjoy. I have, at various points in my career, been the person explaining to other people how technology functions.

Ellie is four and she expects the television to respond when she talks to it.

It does not respond when she talks to it. We have a television that requires a remote control, like a normal television from the early 21st century. She finds this baffling. She has, on multiple occasions, raised her voice at it slightly, the way you might speak more loudly to someone who doesn't understand you, as though the problem is volume rather than fundamental incompatibility between her expectations and the device's capabilities.

I built the internet, more or less, and I cannot explain to my four-year-old why the television doesn't talk back.

The generation gap I expected

I expected to feel out of date with music. I am. I listen to things from the nineties with zero irony, which places me firmly in a demographic. Ellie will eventually develop musical taste and it will not overlap with mine at all, and I will be the uncool dad at the school gate who still thinks Portishead is worth talking about, and that will be that.

I expected to feel out of date with popular culture generally. This is also happening. I do not watch the shows that the parents at nursery are watching. I have not seen the films that are currently relevant. I am vaguely aware of things through osmosis and then slightly more aware of them through Google, which is the adult equivalent of pretending you already knew.

What I did not expect was to feel out of date with the nature of technology itself — with the way children relate to it, expect it to behave, and structure their interactions with it. This is more interesting than I anticipated.

The expectation gap

Ellie was born in 2020. She has never known a telephone that didn't have a screen. She has never known a search that required typing in full sentences. She has never known a question that couldn't be answered by asking an ambient object.

The devices in our house that she interacts with regularly — the tablet, the smart speaker, the phone when she is allowed it — all respond to her voice, remember her preferences, and adapt. These are not special features to her. They are how things work.

The television, which does not do these things, therefore appears to be broken. The remote control appears to be a workaround for a flaw in the design. She tolerates it the way I might tolerate a website that makes me scroll rather than having already anticipated what I need.

I find this genuinely fascinating from an engineering perspective and genuinely challenging from a parenting perspective, because the expectations she is developing about technology are not wrong — she is correctly identifying the direction of travel — they are just in advance of the current state of most of the objects in our house.

The actual generation gap

What I have found is that the real generation gap is not about specific technologies. It is about something more fundamental: pace.

Ellie has grown up with interfaces that respond immediately, completely, and without the latency of a human. She has grown up with content that is personalized to her viewing history, that is available on demand, that does not require waiting for a time slot. She has grown up in an environment where most of her digital interactions are frictionless by design.

I grew up with friction. You waited for the page to load. You watched the programme at the time it was on. You went to the library for the information. You had the experience of wanting something and not being able to have it immediately, and learning to be in that space.

I am not saying friction was better. I am saying it produced a different nervous system, a different set of defaults, a different relationship with the gap between wanting and having.

I am raising a child who does not have the same defaults, in a world that is mostly arranged to not require them. I think about what this means for her more than I let on.

What I've decided

I'm not a screen-time absolutist. I work in technology, I know the nuance, I am not going to pretend that the problem is screens. It isn't screens. It is context and balance and the cultivation of the capacity to be bored — which is a genuine cognitive skill, increasingly rare, and worth preserving.

So we have a rule in our house that is simple enough for a four-year-old to understand: screens are something you choose, not something that just happens. You ask, you get a time limit, you have a transition. The tablet does not automatically come out after school. Television does not fill silence by default.

And the television, to be clear, still does not respond when she talks to it. It will remain this way for the foreseeable future. There are some arguments for friction. I am holding this one.