In The Woods

There is a wonderful question doing the meme-rounds: 'Do your bins go out more than you do?' I confess, yes. I'm middle-aged with a young child, so staying home of an evening is my new normal. I've even realized how wine collections happen — you keep buying bottles faster than responsible parenting allows you to drink them.

Being moderately reclusive, though, I'm rather enjoying this stage of life. There is something nourishing about a shared family routine that feeds the soul — breakfasts together, the choreography of dinner-dishes-bath, and so on. It actually takes quite a chunk of encouragement for me to seek social engagements. Consequently, my wife has started kicking me out of the house twice a month.

You'd be amazed how many temporarily exiled husbands you run into at "obviously dad meetups that aren't named as such". And, disproving the stereotype that men are unable to talk to each other, we have two inexhaustible conversation topics. These are "back in our day" and "the world our kids will grow up in". A group of dads can talk for hours about these things, never once stooping to the dreg of conversation — what do you do for a living? Recently, I discovered that a very modern theme unites these topics. Paradoxically, however, it's exemplified by the age-old mystery of dirty magazines in the woods.

International friends assure me that this wasn't a purely British phenomenon. But, if you're from a place and time that didn't have it, the mystery is easy to describe. Around the age of eleven or twelve, boys who had been playing in woodlands for years, would suddenly notice that there were magazines full of naked women on the ground. You'd never seen them before, you didn't know who put them there, or why, but you really liked them. You frequented the woods almost daily thereafter.

I've spoken to many dads about this, and while nobody can categorically say that older teenagers left the magazines, we all agree that they probably did. This raises an important question — were we supposed to leave dirty magazines in the woods too? Were we supposed to pay it forward when we were old enough to steal Playboy from newsagents? Because we didn't — broadband happened and magazines became redundant.

I have two great fears. The first is that I'll fail to shepherd my son through our rapidly changing technology landscape. The second is that I'll fail to equip him for the many formative moments that I have no control over. Together, these fears force a question — what does changing technology mean for those formative moments? What role will technology play when older teenagers — themselves just kids — are more influential to my son's psychology than I am? What influence might I maintain, if any? And it is that lack of control and influence, or at least the fear of it, that terrifies me and every other parent.

I've thought of all manner of things I might do to alleviate the problem — adding a whitelist to my home router, restricting apps on smartphones, relocating my family to a yurt in Lapland. But, as I wrote some time ago, I think banning smartphones for under sixteens is the only option. So long as some kids have the damned things in the playground, every kid will see what's on them.

Most dads agree with me. Occasionally, however, one points out that every new generation has faced new challenges — TV in the fifties, recreational drugs in the sixties, AIDS in the eighties. Youngsters in those days reached adulthood, had their own kids, and repeated the cycle. Maybe life will go on, much as it always has?

Maybe smartphones with always listening AI, purposefully addictive algorithmic content delivery, and dopamine-optimized user interfaces will turn out fine. Perhaps history will remember them as no more damaging to kids than attending a Motörhead concert?

I doubt it, but travelling back from an event the other week, I saw something heartwarming — a single abandoned shoe on top of a bus shelter. Nobody knows who puts them there, or why, but it's probably teenagers. Life continues, for now.