Back in the 1940s the United States government made films for all the millions of people who joined the forces, worked in factories or who were in any way involved in the war, as everyone was. The films were called Why We Fight. They are not fun viewing, especially the last ones. There's not much of the rah rah cheerleading you might, if you were cynical or more modern, expect.
Save The World - You Betcha!
Why we write is the same. Children and young people have had their world up-ended. Their childhood is not like yours. For better or worse.
First, Covid meant they didn't go to school or go out to play with friends. Which meant they didn't get to talk face-to-face with people of their own age. They missed out on a major proportion of their childhood. A year or two of lockdowns is long enough when you're older. When you're six it can mean a third of your whole life. And they've got mobile phones. The world they experience is not the world you experienced. It's not just that the world has changed, although it has. It's more complicated than that. When you were six you walked down the street. You went to the park, or the field, or the football pitch or your friend's house and you saw the world opening up before you. Your life was changed by the unique things you saw, and all the amazing and new things your experienced. You changed you. You built you.
That's changed. On a mobile phone, on Meta, on Insta, on a tablet, even on Google, it's not about what you experience. It's about what's chosen for you to experience, by Mark Zuckerberg, by an algorithym, or by Andrew Tate. The world your child is going to experience online is not the world you experienced in real life. It's a world chosen for them, by people you don't know.
We can't get rid of mobile phones and there are lots of reasons why we shouldn't. The whole online world can be useful. But like anything else, too much of it is too much. Real life is about Goldilocks' porridge, with not too much and not too little of everything. It's about balance.
And you build that the old way, by sitting down with your children face to face, within touching distance, talking, listening and learning, the way Helping Cards were designed to help.