35-year-old mother of two Ysabel Cooper recently expressed her fear that iPads are negatively impacting her children – specifically, their ability to engineer deeply unrealistic maladaptive daydreams.
“I just feel like kids are becoming too dependent on iPads these days,” Ysabel told reporters. “When I was a kid, we didn’t spend all day engaging with screens. We sat alone in our rooms creating and living within incredibly implausible and largely harmful internal fantasies as an obvious coping mechanism for our larger discontentment with our lives. Just like kids are meant to!”
Ysabel said she just feels like children aren’t using their imaginations to create alternate universes to escape the bleak drudgery of their current reality like she used to, adding that now, “the iPads do all the work for them!”
“I’ve read studies that suggest that too much time spent on iPads has a negative impact on early childhood development,” Ysabel said. “And I completely agree! How are these kids going to learn how to channel their loneliness into a hyper realistic daydream about running away with all five members of One Direction and starting a new, secret life on the coast of Portugal? They’re at such a disadvantage in that regard.”
When asked how her kids spend their time on their iPads, Ysabel said they mostly wile away the hours “making beautiful digital art” or “playing interactive, dynamic world-building games” in which they “get lost in beautiful, intricate universes of their own creation.”
“It’s really sad to see them using a screen as a vehicle for honing their skills, creating art, and using their imaginations,” Ysabel added. “They’re completely losing out on the poignant experience of restlessly pacing in their room, having nowhere to channel their creative energy, and instead spending their time dreaming up how they’d best a bear in open combat if all they had was a sword and a mischievous dog best friend who would die for them.”
At press time, Ysabel had decided to implement weekly “no screen time” in her home – not so that she and her children could connect, but so they could each use that time to individually stare at a wall and dream up the different things they would being doing if they didn’t have to be staring at a wall.
“Unfortunately, they said they mostly daydreamed about the art they’d make about this experience on their iPads, so I fear it may already be a lost cause.”
