The Generation Gap Is Real. It's Also Not What I Expected.

Ellie asked me last autumn if I knew who Taylor Swift was. She is four. She had encountered the name at nursery, the way four-year-olds encounter cultural phenomena — as a fact delivered by another four-year-old with the confidence of someone citing a primary source.

I said yes, I knew who Taylor Swift was.

She was appalled. Her exact expression was the expression of a person who has just discovered that something they considered private is actually shared property.

"How do you know?" she asked.

"I'm quite old," I said. "I know about most things."

She considered this. "Did you know about her when she was little?"

"Something like that."

She has not raised the subject again. I believe she is processing it.

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The generation gap I expected

I prepared, in advance, for the obvious version of this. The music I haven't heard. The films I haven't seen. The memes that will be current when she is sixteen that I will encounter approximately four years after they are current. The slang that I will attempt and fail to deploy correctly and that she will find excruciating.

This is coming. I am ready for it. I have been excruciating to a teenager before — my own parents, reliably, once per school holiday — and I understand my eventual role.

I also prepared for the technology gap. I have written about this already. The television that doesn't respond. The expectation of immediacy. The child who has never known friction in an interface.

These are the gaps I saw coming. They are present, they are real, and they are largely fine.

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The gap I didn't expect

What I did not expect was the tempo gap.

I grew up in an era of structured boredom. Saturday morning television ended. The video shop closed. The dial-up connected for the fifteen minutes of internet we had budgeted. These were not tragedies. They were the texture of time, the experience of wanting something and having to wait, of having an afternoon with no specific content that needed to be filled from the inside rather than from a device.

Ellie does not have this texture. Not because I have given her unlimited screens — she hasn't got them — but because the world she inhabits is arranged around the assumption that boredom is a problem to be solved rather than a state to be occupied. The toys are responsive. The books have sound buttons. The nursery day is structured and narrated.

The Saturday morning when nothing is planned is a genuinely novel experience for her, and her response to it — an escalating series of requests for things to do, culminating in some creative but usually destructive project involving her bedroom furniture — is the response of a nervous system that has learned to expect stimulus and doesn't yet know how to generate it internally.

Teaching her to be bored is one of the more counterintuitive things I have had to actively attempt. Not as punishment. As education.

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The gap I'm choosing to close and the one I'm choosing to keep

I am actively trying to close the gap on certain things. I listen to what she listens to. I know about Taylor Swift. I am interested in the things she finds interesting, not as a performance of interest but because she is interesting, and the things that interest her are my best window into what she is and is becoming.

I am choosing to keep the tempo gap. Not as denial but as deliberate provision of something the wider environment is not providing.

We have a rule on Sunday mornings: nothing scheduled before 10am. No screens before 10am. The morning is unstructured time to be in whatever way seems right. She complains about this sometimes. She also, with increasing frequency, appears in the kitchen at 8:30am having decided to do something she invented herself — a project, a story, a game — that she has been working on in her room for forty minutes.

That forty minutes is not nothing. That forty minutes is the beginning of a capacity I want her to have, that I think is worth having, that the world will not automatically provide.

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The Taylor Swift thing

I should finish this. She came back to it three days later.

"Did you like her music?" Ellie asked. "When you were young."

"Her music wasn't out yet when I was your age," I said. "She wasn't born yet."

Ellie processed this. "Was anyone's music out?"

"Lots of people's music was out," I said. "Different people."

"Did you like it?"

"Some of it. I liked a lot of things."

She nodded. The conversation moved on. But I had the sense that a category had been updated somewhere in her understanding of me — that I had gone from "a dad who knows about things" to "a person who was alive before some things existed," which is a different and I think more interesting category.

I am forty-four. I was alive before things existed. I have feelings about this that I mostly keep to myself, but occasionally I find them useful.