Something about the fairytale The Twelve Dancing Princesses really caught my fancy as a child. Perhaps it was the groves of trees shimmering with leaves of gold, silver, and diamonds or the dancers whirling around the ballroom in gorgeous dresses, but whatever the appeal, the story came home from the library countless times with me. For present purposes, let me tell you a badly amputated version.
Once upon a time, there was a herd boy who dreamed of princesses and palaces. One day while tending his cows, a mysterious woman appeared to him in a vision, urging him to follow his dreams, so he left his cows and journeyed to a far off castle, where lived a king and his twelve beautiful daughters. A mystery surrounded these princesses. Every night, after wishing them all a good night and sweet dreams, their father personally locked the door to their room, but every morning, when he returned, he found that all the princesses’ dancing slippers were worn through. Nobody could figure it out, and the princesses only gave coy smiles to questions regarding the holes in their slippers. This went on night after night, and the king became worried sick. His daughters, formerly so radiant and full of life, had become cold and detached. They took little notice of the world around them. Desperate to solve this mystery, the king offered the hand of one of his daughters in marriage to the man who could discover the cause of the worn out slippers. Many young men volunteered for the task, but although they kept watch over the princesses at night, by morning, they had each mysteriously disappeared.
Now, to ungraciously fast forward through the groves of trees, the dancing, the romance, and all the suspense:
The herd boy becomes gardener to the princesses and, with the help of the mysterious woman, learns to become invisible. He discovers that there is a trapdoor underneath the eldest princess’ bed that leads to an enchanted castle where the princesses dance each night away, hence the tattered slippers. With the help of the youngest princess, the herd boy breaks the spell, the princesses are freed from their twilight world, and after he triumphantly reveals the secret to the king, the herd boy marries the youngest princess. The end.
It’s been years since I pored over the gorgeous illustrations from the version by Marianna Mayer and K.Y. Craft, but now I’m reading it again with my children. To my surprise this story, as old as it is, feels eerily modern. Those princesses…there’s something familiar about them. Those bright eyes growing dim, those joyful smiles flattening, that detached, careless attitude…I know that! So do my kids. So, probably, do you. These princesses are here, all around us, but they’re not really here. They’ve been sucked into screens.
Here’s how the modern version of the fairytale goes: after the king kisses his daughters goodnight and locks the door behind him, the girls reach under their pillows and pull out their screens. They spend the night whirling through cyberspace, feasting on bytes and pixels, dancing with digital princes. When their father returns in the morning, he finds his daughters fatigued and sluggish, an air of discontentment hanging about them. They seem disconnected, uninterested in him or in the world that actually surrounds them. They’re depressed, they’re incredibly vain, and nothing seems to hold their attention anymore. They are becoming not the living dead, but the opposite—the dead living. They are alive but not really here.
The king is totally at a loss. He’s done all he can to protect his daughters from intruders and evildoers. Their bedroom is the safest part of the castle. And yet his children are being stolen from him as surely as if some invader had breached the walls and carried them off, though in this case, he can’t launch a rescue party and chase down the bad guys.
The king is desperate for a champion to rescue his daughters. Unfortunately, the herd boy has also been enchanted by screens. He likes princesses and castles, and he’s found loads of them through his screens, so there’s no need to stir himself and work to attain a real princess and a real castle. He doesn’t really dream anyway because screens mess up his sleep, so the mysterious lady can’t reach him to urge him to rescue the princesses. Although he lives in a simple herd boy’s hut, on his screen he lords over a seraglio. Artificial intelligence can create any fantasy he can think of. Why face the risk of real life?
This is looking pretty hopeless. What is the king to do?
Get rid of the screens, of course. They’re stealing away his children from the inside. The princesses are confused about who they are and what life is, and they won’t escape as long as they’re mesmerized by screens. But there’s just one problem. The king himself has been enchanted. He used to rule just fine without screens, but screens have made so many things so much easier and convenient that he can’t imagine life without them. They’ve been fabulous for keeping track of what’s happening at the frontiers, for checking in with how the different lords are faring, for itemizing his subjects’ grievances. He can monitor the treasury, the armory—even his own personal health. It’s all on a nice little dashboard that appears at the flick of a finger. His word has never been more his command. He can even watch simultaneous jousting matches from all over the kingdom.
He’s caught. His daughters are caught. The herd boy is caught. And so are we.
Screens are an inside job. The places that should be the securest refuges have been compromised, but not by enemies rushing over the drawbridge and swarming the keep. No, in this case, the king and queen themselves have thrown open the trapdoor where their enemies were lurking and welcomed them in. Just look at what’s happening at church. Ostensibly, everyone has their screens at church for singing hymns and reading scriptures, but usually what happens on screens during church has nothing to do with the gospel. People are shopping for clothes. They’re watching weird internet videos of people vacuuming their shoes, pouring concrete, or unloading dirt bikes. They’re taking selfies and editing them. They’re flipping through pictures of their friends posing with their boyfriends a million different ways. They’re playing games. Sometimes they get so into the games that they actually let out a victory whoop during somebody’s talk. A lot of times, they’re messaging. They put down their phones to take the Sacrament and pick them back up the second they’ve popped the bread in their mouths, fingers flying across their tiny digital keyboards. Even when the screens are put away, they still shout out ugly music in the middle of the meeting because someone forgets to turn off their ringer. So much for this being the most sacred and holy time of the week. There’s a trapdoor underneath the pews.
It used to be just the teenagers and young adults who were the flagrant screen users during church, but now it’s multigenerational. A whole row of congregants, heads bent, fingers tapping, including the toddlers. Even when the speaker is a gifted storyteller or has an inspiring experience to share, the eyes stay glued to the screens. I remember one Sunday, somebody was sharing an incredible story of how a stranger had reached out to him at one of the lowest points of his life. It was the kind of beautiful story that pulls you in and makes you forget time is passing. I was trying hard to blink back tears when suddenly my attention was caught by somebody’s phone (this wasn’t the only phone out either): this person was scrolling through inane video snippets, one of which featured someone using a tennis-ball retriever to pick up a line of tennis balls. It was the kind of thing you would be bored watching in real life. If you can’t put the screen down for a story like the one being told, what can you put it down for? Sunday worship service is supposed to be an opportunity to reset, a chance to reflect and hear in our hearts the whisperings from Heaven of a job well done and of work left to do, but this has been hijacked from the inside by the screens, the soul thieves. It’s hard to learn the language of faith if you’re not listening. People’s intent may be to worship the Almighty, but they’ve been lured to worship the work of human hands instead.
What happens in public plays out in private a hundred-fold more acutely. Just like those enchanted princesses, people are being stolen away from the inside. It’s particularly dramatic to watch this happen to children. Only very young children put up any resistance to screens, and it’s not long before even they become enchanted. After all, they’re photographed and videoed since before they are born. From earliest infancy, babies get a front-row seat to screens as adults juggle them and their devices. It’s only a matter of time before little kids’ eyes glaze over, their smiles dim, and their interest in the real world and in real people flickers. Sometimes it dies. Their friends come bursting through the door, ready to play, but instead of dropping whatever it was they were doing and running towards their friends with delight, they barely register their playmates’ arrival. The screens have enchanted them.
It gets worse as kids reach adolescence. Parents are tired of having to share with the little pests who incessantly beg for the phone. Besides, it would be nice to upgrade. The kid gets the old phone, and the parents scroll in peace on their fancy new phones. Now the kids all come to Sunday school with their digital scriptures. From the teacher’s perspective, the kids might look like they’re diligently studying. Stand behind them, and it’s a different story. They’re sending each other idiotic messages (“Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi.”), taking surreptitious pictures of each other, playing video games. Even if you’re trying to ignore your classmates’ shenanigans and pay attention, the kid next to you is watching a video of a guy in a bear suit jumping up and down pounding his chest, and without even thinking, you’re watching that guy in the bear suit too.
If you’re the fortunate kid without a phone, good luck making friends. Everyone is too sucked into the digital circus to have a conversation, so you get to sit there like a loser while everyone else stares at their screens (including the adults). Those little spaces before and after class and activities are great times to practice the art of chitchat, but kids don’t even get a chance anymore. Same goes for traveling. It used to be a great opportunity to get to know each other better, since everyone is stuck in the same space for a while. Who knows what memorable things you’ll share? Not anymore. Even in the dead zones, the places with no phone service, you can still play the no-internet dino game.
Adults love to complain that they can’t get the kids’ attention anymore, but what did they expect? They’re the ones who screen-trained the kids from tiniest infancy. Grocery shopping, car trips, going out to eat…hand the kid the phone and you can actually think about what it is you’re trying to get done or what you’re trying to say. Screens are fantastic babysitters. But they never go home. The kids never get a chance to learn to live without them. They’re installed everywhere—cars, airports, restaurants, bedrooms, even the ceiling of the dentist’s office. It doesn’t matter if you make the effort yourself to keep screens away from kids—relatives, neighbors, and friends can’t seem to help shoving them in the kids’ faces. It’s demonic.
I have yet to meet an adult who lived in the era before ubiquitous screens who wishes they were growing up now. The universal answer is vigorous gratitude for having been born pre-cell phone, pre-(anti)social media. We understand that it’s pretty tough to grow up with your soul intact these days. Giving a kid a phone and an antisocial media account is like locking him on a bus full of middle schoolers without any monitoring—forever. And yet knowing all this, the best that adults seem to be willing to do to protect the next generation is to help them hold off on having their own phone until they’re…fourteen, sixteen, eighteen? The reasoning among more responsible adults seems to be, don’t let the kids become phone addicts until they’re sort of grown up (which more accurately means, give the kid a phone while they’re staggering through a raging hormonal storm). Too bad most kids I know don’t even get that kind of protection; they already have phones at age eleven or earlier, poor things, and of course, that’s not mentioning all the other screens that have hovered around them since they were born. We don’t pat ourselves on the back for preventing our children from smoking until they’re sixteen. We don’t tell ourselves it’s better to teach our children to smoke responsibly while they’re still at home. We don’t give them “safe” cigarettes that we can control and monitor. Cigarettes are terrible. But they aren’t the portal to hell that screens have proven to be.
I’m not kidding about the portal to hell. Back when I was still in school, a pair of parole officers came to present about juvenile delinquents. They remarked that they had seen a shift in the profile of juvenile sex offenders. Whereas previously your typical juvenile sex offender came from a home without much structure or stability, usually someone who had previously been a victim of sexual abuse themselves, now these parole officers were seeing a flood of kids from totally different backgrounds: parents still married, stable incomes, high achievers, no history of abuse. The parole officers pegged this shift to the time that high-speed internet exploded across society. (This was before smartphones, before tablets, before chromebooks, before voice-activated slave-spies and all the rest.) Suddenly kids from “nice” families were getting into stuff that had previously been totally inaccessible to them. They had demons in their heads tormenting them to act out things they had stumbled across. And they did, shattering their own lives and the lives of their victims.
I sat through that presentation more than a decade ago. We all know where things have gone from there. You don’t even have to go looking for filth anymore. It finds you. Children have probably never lived such sanitized, controlled physical lives as now, but they have trapdoors right in their bedrooms, in their pockets, that ooze the kind of putrescent muck that only the blood of a very special Lamb can wipe clean. People love to crow about how child mortality has plummeted over the past century or so, but no one wants to reckon with the fact that now we’re losing the kids to early spiritual death instead. So much for Progress. There’s no need to repeat the avalanche of research on how screens and the internet have messed with children. Depression, anxiety, panic attacks, suicide…it’s all normal now. For children! Kids these days have the posture of eighty-five-year-old professors. They have the attention span of house flies. They’re myopic and medicated. They’re puffy and pale. They can hardly talk. When they do, it’s just a flood of nonsense they repeat on loop from video games and the internet. (“Skibidi ohio rizz.”) Their sense of what’s real is totally skewed. (“I saw this guy on YouTube eat metal, so I’m going to eat this aluminum can.”) They’re world-weary and nihilistic when they should be running open-armed into the sunshine, ready to soak in all the richness of life. The poor things are trapped in their cyberlives. They are being laid on the altar, offered up as sacrifices to the gods we’ve fashioned from silicon, aluminum, and glass. They don’t even have to be tied up; they just lie there, staring wide-eyed into the screens sucking their lives away.
It doesn’t matter if these aren’t your kids or grandkids or nieces and nephews. These are somebody’s kids. Somebody’s flesh-and-blood are paying with their lives. Human sacrifice is the price of living in the screen world, and there’s no use pretending otherwise. So the honest question is, how many kids should we sacrifice? How many kids do we throw away?
You don’t like that question? Me neither. But there’s no getting around it. The evidence is undeniable. How many more kids have to die (literally or spiritually) before the adults are finally convinced that hurtling down a dead-end road at 120 miles an hour headed for a sheer granite wall is not the only option? Society chose to ignore the sensitive, in-tune adults who were sounding the alarm years ago about what was happening to kids on screens, preferring the experts who insisted that the important thing was to have a plan and exercise self-discipline. It was all a bucket of hogwash, as anyone who has ever been around teenagers or children can easily confirm.
While some of these experts are starting to moderate their Panglossian approach to screens, they remain focused on restricting children’s access to screens, which makes their advice useless for all but the highest performing widgets. Their advice is completely out of step with chaotic, restless, individualistic American life, and it ignores the fact that it is adults who not only threw open the trapdoor but rushed down the stairs, teaching by example the world children should desire. It’s time for adults to grow up. It’s time to stop lying to ourselves and do some soul searching and sacrificing. It’s time to give the kids a better life script, to give them something more to aspire to than slumping over a screen for the rest of their lives. If we don’t want to live in a world built on child sacrifice, then it’s up to the adults to nail that trapdoor down. Together.
Image Via: Freerange Stock
