With the holidays approaching, TikTok has been serving me an endless stream of toy ads, but one made me stop scrolling. It was an ad for video walkie-talkies, basically FaceTime screens. My first thought was “Oh, my children would love this.” But as my finger hovered over the shopping cart, I found myself wondering whether my children have been missing out on a key developmental skill.
My children are 10, 9, 7 and 6, and I can probably count on two hands how many times they’ve had a phone call with someone. They FaceTime their grandparents every week and use talk-to-text without thinking twice. But can they hold a real-time conversation without relying on facial expressions and body language? On the phone, a layer of interaction exists underneath the words themselves. You hear someone breathe. You notice a pause and try to figure out what that silence means. You pick up on hesitations or warmth or tension or humor or uncertainty.
With a traditional walkie-talkie, children have to follow a system. They press the button to talk and release it to listen. They learn to listen closely, be patient and use a shared language like “copy” or “over” as part of the back-and-forth. It may sound simple, but there are real skills hiding in that exchange. If they are looking at each other on a screen, none of those skills ever come into play.
I am a millennial, so I grew up talking for hours on the phone. With anxiety rising in younger generations, I cannot help but think these conversations mattered more than we understood.
Kate Cunningham, Elyria, Ohio
The writer is a teacher at the Lorain County Detention Home for juveniles.
Gift cards make great bookmarks
Fox News guest Jade Warshaw unleashed a revolt last month with her advice to forgo adult Christmas gift giving. “Budget, budget, budget,” she said. “Remember, adults don’t need gifts, okay? Focus on the people in your life who are age 3 to 18. Grandma doesn’t need slippers.”
I’m with Warshaw on this one but not due to belt tightening. The practice of adults buying each other Christmas gifts should have begun declining in 1962 and dropped off steeply in 2001. Why? Walmart opened on the first date, and Amazon became profitable on the second.
I grew up between these two dates, when it was still possible to find unique, thoughtful gifts that you couldn’t get in your hometown: that bottle of California wine, those chocolate-covered Idaho huckleberries, that Panama hat from Miami. Where else could you find a snow globe of Niagara Falls than Niagara Falls? Now, there is nothing you can buy someone that they cannot buy themselves. The gift card is a societal admission that we’ve given up trying.
What to do? Get your loved ones a book. But not just any bestseller that Amazon could and probably has suggested for them. Rather, a book from an emerging local talent. Not only are there troves of local authors with award-winning works; they also cover the gamut of interests and passions, from cooking to romance to vegetarian vampires. (It’s a thing.) Stuffing stockings with local books invests in human growth and helps reverse declines in critical thinking, attention spans and empathy.
Joe Relk, Burke
Public health, up in smoke
Regarding the Dec. 13 editorial “The ultra-fringe alliance against ultra-processed food”:
It is laughable that San Francisco is suing processed food manufacturers for the health consequences that reportedly occur when city residents choose to consume their products, while leaving promoters of alcohol, tobacco, cannabis and other addictive substances largely alone.
What will the city opt to target next? Red meat? Whole milk? McDonald’s?
James S. Kennedy, Smyrna, Tennessee
The writer is founder and president of CDIMD Physician Champions.
A question for bullies
Regarding the Dec. 10 news article “Police investigation faults Nancy Mace in profanity-laced tirade at airport”:
Yes, the lordly behavior from Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) toward airport employees and Transportation Security Administration officers was disgusting. But I wish to enlarge the picture. I have seen all too many politicians, male and female, treat people here in Washington like serfs.
In honor of a national treasure’s 100th birthday on Dec. 13, I wish to suggest the perfect response to bullying, from an old episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” If anyone asks, “Don’t you know who I am?,” just say, “Don’t you know who you are?”
John Lockwood, Washington
Magic or machine?
If a stage magician explains how a trick is accomplished, we can still admire the design and performance of the trick. Similarly, if we identify the processes that create our consciousness, we can still retain our sense of self, our self-awareness and our internal dialogues. Whether consciousness is revealed to derive from physics as we know it, or a new extension of natural law into an immaterial realm, or the teachings of our religions, it would not change our existence.
The success of large language models does not prove that they are or ever will become conscious, nor that human self-awareness is produced by the same processes. But we shouldn’t reject these possibilities so quickly, as Andrew Klavan and Spencer A. Klavan do in their Dec. 9 op-ed, “Why AI can never become conscious.” The authors point out that an LLM is not designed to reproduce our internal mental operation — how we think — but merely to statistically imitate text written by humans. That makes the results all the more remarkable! Though not designed to think, the system looks as though it is. How did that happen? Maybe we should be asking whether our own mental processes are less brilliant than we like to believe.
Steve Lowe, Sudbury, Massachusetts
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