THERE’S NO ESCAPING SCREEN TIME, EVEN ON A BIKE.

Just when you think you’ve seen everything you realize they’re just warming up. On, in this case, a stationary bike for small children. Complete with… video screen. You know. In case there was any chance of their venturing outside into the dreaded reality.

I would not make something like this up. Nor should anybody else. But Fisher-Price did. It is of course educational. What parent isn’t sweating blue water constantly about giving their kid that special edge at age three that will see them cruise into Harvard with a dazzling resume of community service and academic excellence and become an agent of change earning six figures easy? Hence the Think & Learn Smart Cycle.

With, as I say, a tablet. An educational one, of course, running four apps that emphasize literacy, STEM, math and social studies according to a not entirely friendly review on engadget. (In case you’re not a trend bunny, STEM is “Science, technology, engineering and the need to balance, the risk of bumping into things, the amazing colours and sights of nature, and other people. Perhaps even their parents. I believe sociologists would refer to the last as “bonding” or some such abstraction. But I call it sharing life and love more fully.

I do not deny that once irrepressibly energetic children are increasingly, bizarrely, in need of exercise. Our ongoing efforts to improve life scientifically until it is ruined include altering the food we eat, how we live and other factors possibly including all the drugs we take to be healthier to create such an appalling obesity epidemic that they had to rename adult onset diabetes because kids now get it so often. But a stationary bike is only “exercise” in the sense that microwaved frozen dinner is cooking. Sometimes you have no choice. But it should not be your choice.

I use a hotel treadmill while travelling on business, with old-time radio on the earbuds. But at home I do karate, requiring strength, balance, alertness, and… other people.

Which brings me to all those blasted tablets. Apparently Fisher-Price did research showing that preschoolers (yes, preschoolers) watch some 19 hours of video a week and spend about 1/5 of all their “playtime” on electronic devices. What ever happened to the precautionary principle?

There was NO SUCH THING AS A TABLET BEFORE 2010. We have no idea what long-term immersion in this artificial environment does to developing minds, including pernicious isolation from normal human interaction. But instead of careful investigation, we hurled our precious children into the digital pool hoping they’d somehow float.

See, it sedates them, and mommy and daddy need quiet time. (See children into adults and vice versa above.) And instead of challenging this trend, the TLSC bribes kids into artificial physical activity with even more of the artificial mental kind, and bribes parents by calling it educational.

Of course proper education involves gaining some understanding of how digital devices like the one I’m writing on now work, as well as the various apps, né programs, they run. But man does not live by app alone. Child certainly doesn’t.

Fight back. Pry your kid away from the artificiality in all its forms. Away from tablets. Away from fast food. And away from a stationary bike onto a real one, or into hopscotch, moving on real feet not pressing the up arrow to make the avatar jump.

Developing minds and bodies need reality. As do we all.

PRY YOUR KID AWAY FROM ARTIFICIALITY IN ALL ITS FORMS. — JOHN ROBSON