I have written before about the way my children interact with the Alexa in our home.
Alexa is a small, puck-like box that listens for its name, and when you ask a question, it quickly searches the internet and gives you an answer. You can also ask it to do personal tasks or to even entertain you.
My children love it!
Recently, my middle boys took an Alexa to their room. It plays music for them and recites the times table, which the third-grader is trying to learn for school.
It also provides an interesting look into what they are doing while they are supposed to be in bed.
In the hour before they fell asleep last evening, my boys tasked Alexa 94 times. To be fair, I think the third grader did all of the talking.
Just in the last week the run-up to bedtime is filled with an eclectic smattering of requests.
Often they ask for music. Sometimes they ask for a specific song — the Star-Spangled Banner being the most popular, along with a variety of pop songs including Drip, Astronaut in the Ocean, Fancy Like and songs from The Greatest Showman. Just as often, the boys ask about an entire genre of music — such as eight hours of soothing bagpipe music or fight songs.
They also ask a lot of questions about who would win in a fight. Sometimes the combinations make sense — triceratops versus Spinosaurus or hawk versus falcon— sometimes they cross categories — blue whale versus cheetah, tiger shark versus tiger — and sometimes they are ridiculous — Spinosaurus versus hippo or green ant versus the world’s oldest bird.
There are a lot of philosophical questions as well: Alexa, can you feel? How old will I be when I die? Are UFOs real? Why did someone kill Martin Luther King Jr.? When will the world end?
Finally, there are what we will call, general trivia: Would a horse eat a hamburger? Who is the world’s fatest man? When was the first T-Rex found? Where is Hollywood?
I am grateful for the glimpse into their mind and to what they do and think in the moments before bed.
In the newsroom, we were talking about this idea. The more we talked, the more convinced I was that this Alexa conversation is a portal to who they will become as adults. Let me explain.
When I was a child, I had a small transistor radio that my grandmother gave me. I would put it under my pillow to soften the sound into my ear and lay awake, for hours listening to sports. To this day my sleep monitor looks like a picket fence. I wake up often and when I do, I will watch all or portions of games in the middle of the night. It doesn’t matter what sport and it doesn’t need to be a team I follow. Often, it will be a game I know the result of and now want to learn how it happened.
Kayleen said she would hide a flashlight, then lay under her blankets and read. I know that is a habit my older son had and we actually encouraged it, as did Kayleen’s folks I am sure. As an adult, Kayleen enjoys reading tremendously. She reads a wide variety of books and is one of the people I choose to solicit book recommendations from because I respect her opinion and taste.
My elder sister talked about her anxiety, how she would lie awake and worry about house fires and health and being kidnapped and about her family. She is an extremely successful woman with a wonderful family who serves as an assistant vice president of a major university. But she still struggles with anxiety. She is also one of the most compassionate, empathetic people I have ever met. She feels the anxiety of others and has spent a large portion of her life advocating for those who cannot or will not advocate for themselves.
Another sister mentioned that she would perform chores or do acts of service to avoid even going to bed. Once there, she said she would read, or play, or try to watch television. This too is on brand with a woman who today struggles to slow down. She works harder than anyone else in her field and fills time with a thousand activities… none of them relaxing.
Raised in an era when children had televisions and computers in their room, Michael Williamson said he would try to watch movies. While Mike was not part of the original conversation, this was our guess as to what a young Mike would do.
Editor Chad Williamson didn’t have much to add to the conversation. He said that when told to go to bed, he did. He said he didn’t love anything more than sleeping. Like all the others, this make sense. He always seems irritable, I assume because he is exhausted.
I don’t know why it is this way — if we fill the day’s final moments with what we love, or if the memory of those happy, unrushed moments help us love those activities.
I also don’t know what this means for my sons.
–Mac Cordell is a reporter for the Journal-Tribune.