The struggle is real:
parents vs robots

Molly Gunn, Editor - 22 Mar 23

I have to wonder who is bringing up my kids. Is it You Tube, or me? I jest… in part.

I do feel lately that life has become a daily battle: us vs screens, robots or algorithms. My kids – age 12, 9 and 5 – all love a screen, so me and my husband Tom are constantly monitoring their usage. Right now a fair amount of our time at home is spent either cajoling the kids to get off the iPads, TV or Xbox – so we can eat dinner together or go for a walk – or we’re negotiating with the kids when they can jump on screens. We’re still pre-phones, but it is only a matter of time.

I laugh at my pre-kid self, the woman who proclaimed before having her first child, ‘Of course, I won’t let him watch much TV.” Ha, bloody ha. That was before I realised that an episode of In the Night Garden allowed me to have a shower and do my makeup undisturbed! But those days of CBeebies circa 2011, feel like a fond memory. 

My children do stuff off screens: drawing, riding bikes, Rubix Cubing, cooking, crafting… but I’ve noticed the screens’ presence more, recently. I wonder where it’s going. Having watched a lot of dystopian / post-apocalyptic films, my mind is awash with what the future might look like for my children: mixing human, robot and A.I. reality. 

Will the future be like Wall-E? I think the Pixar film is one of the best future-thinking prophetic films out there: humans are educated and served by robots; a giant corp By N Large has the monopoly on everything; people are obese, have given up walking, and only communicate through screens.

Or will the future be like in She? The film where Scarlett Johansson plays a husky-voiced A.I., which Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with. Or, will the future see robots go all out for world domination, and try and take over like we saw in Mitchells vs The Machines, or the Terminator films?

I have an active imagination, sparked probably by too much TV (the irony is not lost on me), but these are the thoughts popping into my head when my son watches two hours of Minecraft algorithm on YouTube. Little did I know that a large part of having kids would be a battle against the robots. Nobody mentioned this. 

When I say robots, I’m not just talking TV: it’s the fact that this Google Doc I’m writing on is trying to finish my sentences with its own words (back off!), or the fact that my sons love to tell me, “You need Grammarly!” With me sounding like an old-fashioned person as I reply: “Writing is an art form, boys. I don’t need Grammarly and neither do you.”

I mentioned to one of my sons, a budding artist, that in the future his competition won’t just be other human artists, it will be A.I. art and graphics too. He just shrugged. To him that is normal. At age 9, he can already design graphics better on Pro Create than I can on Photoshop, which I learned at Art College 20 years ago. 

To them, robots are part of the furniture. It’s not like my kids aren’t imaginative and artistic – they are loud, creative, funny! I’m just coming to terms with the new juggle us parents face – learning how to encourage on and off-screen talents in tandem. Exploring offerings from ChatGPT or Adobe’s new Firefly, or whatever’s next, while also passing on our own creative enjoyments, from cooking to scrapbooking. To dismiss one or the other would be naive. 

In the meantime, I’m wondering if we didn’t have so many screens at our children’s disposal would they use them less? Maybe we’ll remove all robots for a few weeks in the Summer, and see what happens: in a post-apocalypse world, the power lines might be down anyway. So we best teach them how to camp under the stars, too.

Molly Gunn, Editor

Molly Gunn is the founder and editor of Selfish Mother, a site she created for like-minded women in 2013. Molly has been a journalist for over 15 years, starting out working on fashion desks at The Guardian, The Telegraph & ES Magazine before going freelance in 2006 to write for quality publications. She now edits Selfish Mother, sells #GoodTees to raise funds for charity, & writes freelance for Red Magazine and The Sunday Telegraph's Stella. Molly is mother to Rafferty, 6, Fox, 4, and baby Liberty. She is married to Tom aka music producer Tee Mango and founder of Millionhands. They live in Bruton, Somerset.

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