My son has only recently discovered YouTube, but his interests are restricted exclusively to those videos which further his obsession with maths: Numberblocks mainly, as well as kid-friendly explorations of math-related phenomena, which he adores as they fly over his head.
We’re sanguine about all this, because we’ve done the sums and are prepared for his eyes to go a little square if it allows him an hour a day to refuel his list of maths questions, rather than repeating the same ones to us, ad nauseum. But mostly, we’re hoping it will rub off on his little sister, who has yet to take to screen time at all.
At the moment – since birth in fact – her relationship to us is less ‘child and parent’ and more ‘koala and tree’. For several hours each day, she insists on being carried and no book, toy or activity can dissuade her from this pleasure. My wife and I realised some time ago that the backpain we share is from lifting and holding her for so much of every day, but, on the plus side, we’ve learned a lot about those things we can and cannot do one-handed. Cracking, frying and serving an egg? Yes. Buttering a single slice of toast? No.
When he was her age, my son’s poison was Baby Shark, so we turned to it for the first time in five years to see if it might work the same magic on her. Watching it now evokes a bittersweet sensation of time not just passing, but being deleted entirely. I know I watched this video thousands of times, yet it seems impossibly ancient.
I remember our first go-round with the adolescent selachimorph as a time of deadening grind, although ‘remember’ might be the wrong word. This was December 2018, so I look up what else was going on then, hoping I could compare how well I remembered the news stories of the time, to the blankness with which Baby Shark now stares back at me with its dead doll’s eyes. I find I can’t remember any of the news stories either, likely because I was subsisting on two hours of trembling sleep a day. The Gatwick drones? A wafer-thin sliver of remembrance. The Yellow Vests movement? A blur of French traffic jams and the vaguely understood aims of men in hi-vis. And, with no little embarrassment and my sincerest apologies to his family, I can confirm that I have only now learned of the death of George HW Bush.
Even though it leaves us cold, Baby Shark offers my son a flicker of distant recognition and he screws his face up in that ‘How do I know you?’ way he does when he meets an auntie he hasn’t seen in a while. My daughter, however, is entranced. She jolts, eyes popping, as if no song has ever rung so sweet in her ear. She claps her hands and approaches the screen with an addict’s rapt attention.
My son loses interest and begins posing maths problems again, but we don’t mind. If he has to pepper us with equations for his sister to loosen her grip, it’s worth it. We’ve done the sums, and it’s a small price to pay.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
