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The Family Room by Michelle Martin

August 3, 2008

Multitasking madness

“Is this good enough to be in the paper, Mama?”

I turned away from my monitor and beheld Frank, eyes fixed on Caroline’s Nintendo DS (a hand-held video game, for those who don’t have kids of a certain age) as his hands manipulated the buttons to control his team in a baseball game, while his hips swiveled the tiniest bit – but somehow enough to keep a hula hoop rotating around him.

Never mind how a child with 24-inch hips can keep a hula hoop up for several minutes at a time without breaking a sweat. Who told him that the goal is to do as many things as possible, all at the same time?

It wasn’t me. I was too busy sewing Caroline’s Girl Scout badges on her vest while I checked my e-mail. Or maybe I was doing a phone interview while I took the kids to the park. Or making dinner while helping with homework.

So maybe I never told him. I just showed him how to fill every second, including waiting for the toast to pop and the Web site to download.

Now Frank likes to do much the same. He plays baseball on the DS while he watches a game. He watches pitch-by-pitch Web coverage of one game while he watches another on TV. He plays fetch with the dog while he reads a book.

About the only time he isn’t doing two things at once is when he is actually playing baseball, and when he goes to church. Baseball he likes. Church, he sort-of likes. He likes the idea of it. It’s just that the reality is a little … boring.

He’s old enough to be quiet and sit still for the most part, and to do his best to participate. But even on his best day, the language of Scripture is not pitched to 7-year-old ears, and if the priests and deacons aimed their Sunday homilies at the primary-grade set, the rest of us would be shortchanged.

So we do our best to make it interesting. I try to tell him ahead of time what the Gospel is about. It’s a bonus if the first reading is one where something happens, especially if it’s a story he knows.

We’re blessed with beautiful windows in our church, so those help. He can always look at the windows when the words are over his head.

But still, it’s not like hula hooping while playing a video game — a skill that I don’t think has been perfected by anyone else.

That’s a good thing, I think.

His life, like most of ours, could use a little more quiet time — a little more time to focus on the liturgy, and not on the cell phone or Blackberry or iPod. Quiet time for prayer is hard enough for adults to come by; for children, who have never known a world without instant communication, it’s a foreign concept. But without it, how do you hear that “tiny whispering sound” that is the voice of God? (1 Kgs 19:12)

He just needs practice to learn how to do it, practice that will last his whole life.

Martin is assistant editor of the Catholic New World. Contact her at [email protected].