Naps, no phones and bath time: How youth is wasted on the young

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Opinion

Naps, no phones and bath time: How youth is wasted on the young

Every morning I ask my son if he’s grown up overnight, and every morning he tells me that he has. Such is the way of three-year-olds. Even though they subsist on nothing but air and the occasional chicken nugget.

A key attraction of childhood is the number of naps you can have.

A key attraction of childhood is the number of naps you can have.Credit:Getty Images

Like all three-year-olds, he’s in a hurry for time to pass. “When will it be Halloween?” he’s asked every day since October 31 last year. “How long until spring?” is the question every morning as we pull on our puffy coats. The only time he doesn’t want the hours to fly by is when he’s watching television, or resisting sleep. (No one has a longer to-do list than a toddler at bedtime, as the expression goes.)

The end of his waiting will come when he reaches the pinnacle of existence: Grown Up. This is the age at which life’s most confounding mysteries are immediately solved. Like what “work” is. (“School but not fun” doesn’t seem to cut it as an explanation for him.) How not to roll out of bed. And whether “adult juice”, served in weird glasses on little sticks, is superior to apple juice.

Once he knows the answer to these questions, he will at the same time realise that everything was in fact better when he was a kid. Take the item he wants to possess most in the entire world: my phone. To be fair, I seem pretty interested in it. A recent study suggests that, on average, Americans pick up their phones 344 times a day. For parents who like to document their child’s every move, I’m sure the number is even higher. Kids don’t even understand cameras to be distinct objects. Taking photos is just what happens on Mummy’s phone.

But even though I am interested in my phone, I do not like it.

Another thing my son is convinced will be better when he grows up is that he won’t have to take a bath every day.

And even though it contains an infinite number of PAW Patrol videos, it would not ultimately bring my son joy to own it, either. I am convinced that within the next 10 to 15 years, phone use will be regulated, like smoking tobacco and other addictive, damaging behaviours. In the meantime, the surest sign that phones are bad is that celebrities are giving them up.

“I haven’t been on the internet in 4½ years,” Selena Gomez told Good Morning America recently. The 29-year-old subsequently told US Vogue that she gets her news from “an older woman I’m really close with”, whose name she would rather not reveal.

Likewise, singer Lily Allen announced last year that she would be removing the web browser from her phone. Allen decided to demote her iPhone to an early-oughts Nokia, functionally speaking, after she realised she was wasting seven hours a day on it. My first thought, on hearing of Allen’s reverse-engineering, was: could I, too, do this? My second thought: never.

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Another thing my son is convinced will be better when he grows up is that he won’t have to take a bath every day. I find a soak in lavender-scented Epsom salts soothing; he regards a daily soap-and-water ritual as a form of tyranny.

For the record, celebrities are also unsure about the bathing thing. Jake Gyllenhaal chimed in to the discourse last year when he said that he, too, didn’t bother with showers, since we “naturally clean ourselves”. There’s a good reason why he’s the world’s most famous ex-boyfriend.

Finally, I rest my case that childhood is better than adulthood with just one word: naps.

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