The Children Who are Growing up in This

I have a niece called Rosa. She is seven.

I watch Rosa sometimes, when I visit. She has a phone. Not fully her own, but close to it. She has a tablet for school. Another for videos. A game thing that lights up and talks to her when she is bored. By the time she is ten she will have spent more hours looking at screens than her grandmother had by the time she was forty.

She already knows the shape of a life on a screen. She knows how to show her good side for a picture. She knows which girls at her school have more followers and which have fewer. She does not yet know there is another way to be a child. She may find out. She may not.

Her parents are doing what they can. They are careful parents. More careful than my parents were, by a long way. They know more about child development than my parents knew. They worry more. They do more things with her. They schedule her life in a way my life was not scheduled.

And yet. Rosa, at seven, is already tired in a way I was not tired at seven. There is a flatness around her eyes when the tablet has been on too long. She has anxieties my generation did not have at her age. She has been told about climate, and about strangers, and about things that could go wrong in the world, in a way no seven-year-old should have had to think about.

I do not blame her parents. They are doing the best they can inside the arrangement we have given them. The arrangement is the problem, not the parenting. The arrangement was not built for seven-year-olds.

Rosa is the generation that will inherit everything we have walked through. The quiet kitchens. The drifting young men. The debts. The tribes. The machines. The race above us.

She will be old enough to vote near the end of the next decade. Old enough to have children of her own, if she chooses, somewhere near the end of the one after. Whatever we have done by then, she will have to live in.

I wonder, sometimes, what she will think of us. Of the phones we gave her. Of the world we handed her.

I wonder, sometimes, whether she will have children.

I hope she does. I am not sure.

If she does not, something that has been true of our species for as long as there have been people will have stopped being true. And we will, among our other inheritances, be the ones who stopped it.