"Everyone's got headphones in"

Look down any street and the fill is what a head has in it. Headphones on the walk, screens in the queue, radio in every kitchen. It's normal, and normal isn't a problem.

Two things. The first is that normal describes the street and not the cost. The street is full of people who haven't had a quiet minute since spring, and that's normal now, and it's also a street full of people whose days aren't getting sorted and whose ideas aren't arriving and who are lying awake with the sorting at three. Normal and costless aren't the same, and the street can't tell you which this is.

The second is the children, because the normal is being learned. A child in a waiting room with a screen, a child in the car with a screen, a child at the table with a parent's phone propped against the ketchup, is a child learning that a quiet minute is a thing to be filled, at the age when what a minute is for gets decided. That child will grow up never having sat in a queue with nothing, and the itch, when it comes at twenty, will feel like an emergency, because it's never once been allowed to pass.

Children used to be bored. It was the ordinary condition of a long afternoon, and out of it came the games, the drawings, the walk to the friend's house, the reading of whatever was in the house. Bench and Lench's account of boredom as the push toward something new is a description of what a bored child does, and it's the thing the screen in the waiting room prevents. A child who's never bored is a child who's never had to find the something, and finding the something is most of what a childhood is for.

I'm not going to tell you how to raise your children in a book about your own headphones. But if you want one reason to leave the walk empty that has nothing to do with you, it's that a child who sees a parent walk with nothing in their ears learns that it can be done, and that's a lesson the street isn't teaching.