This Is A Very Bad Idea

There's a company out there called "Flat Daddies." This company specializes in converting photos of servicemen (and women) into life-size cardboard cutouts. Military families use these flat daddies and mommies as stand-ins for the real, albeit deployed, mommies and daddies. They'll sit Flat Daddy at the dinner table, encourage children to talk to the him, kiss him goodnight, etc.

This is all very creepy. I can only imagine the emotional damage it must do to teach two- or three-year-olds to love a piece of cardboard as they would a parent. But it's about to get so much worse. Flat Daddy is going 3-D.

The Department of Defense has put out a call to software developers to create "a highly interactive PC or web-based application to allow family members to verbally interact with virtual renditions of deployed Service Members." DoD wants the application to "produce compelling interactive dialogue between a Service member and their families … using video footage or high-resolution 3-D rendering. The child should be able to have a simulated conversation with a parent about generic, everyday topics. For instance, a child may get a response from saying 'I love you', or 'I miss you', or 'Good night mommy/daddy.'"

Not good, not good at all. A digitized but realistically lifelike avatar of Mommy or Daddy that will actually discourse with you? That will express love for you? That will tell you that it misses you? I understand we want to shield children from the negative emotions associated with missing a parent, but this is like bringing a new parent into the house. Or, worse, putting a new parent on the tv, and the computer, and carrying him around on an iPod or a cell-phone.

Imagine, if you will, that little Susie is squirming and whining in her grocery cart seat. Her Mommy senses an outburst coming, so she pulls her iPhone from her purse and punches up the Daddy App. Daddy's picture appears on the screen, and his voice - his voice - comes out of the phone, saying, "Where's daddy's little girl? Where's my Susie?" Susie's face instantly brightens and Mommy puts the phone in Susie's outstretched hands. As Susie looks at the screen, the facial recognition software kicks in, and Daddy says, "Oh, there she is. How are you, sweetheart?" "Good," Susie says. Mommy pats Susie on the head and tells her, "Now you talk to Daddy and be good for him." Susie starts to babble away to her nonexistent, digital father, while Mommy continues to shop in peace.

Oh, the horror. I don't think little children can dissociate realistic representations of parents from actual parents. Maybe they wouldn't want to dissociate at all, and instead adopt the digital parent as real. Why? Digital Daddy will never get mad, never shout, never scold, never not be there. He will be the perfect parent in the eyes of the child - always loving, always supportive, always ready to chat, always ready for a game. Real Mommy (or Real Daddy, if Mommy is gone) can't compete with that - the non-deployed parent has real-world concerns that don't permit that kind of unremitting devotion. So gradually the digital parent may become the preferred parent.

And one more thing. What happens when Real Daddy dies? Should Mommy delete Digital Daddy from the iPhone? Should she tell Susie she can't have her Digital Daddy anymore? Or should she keep Digital Daddy - a computer-age Frankenstein's Monster that Susie can interact with forever?

I just think this is a terrible, terrible idea. Sometimes parents go away, and every parent will die eventually. Substituting them with a computer program, no matter how lifelike, must be psychologically harmful to young children because it skews their emotional development. Additionally, it is disrespectful to the memory of one's parents - if your mother is dead, you should celebrate her life and memory, not keep a Tamagotchi of her in your pocket.

Maybe I'm being alarmist. I'm sure people said the same thing about television, the electric babysitter, being harmful to children. And I myself believe that children actually can dissociate the simulated reality of video games from actual reality. But this is different. No one ever put me in front of the tv and told me to treat it like my father, or handed me Mommy the Video Game and told me to be good for this digital Mommy.

Bad idea. Bad idea. But I'm sure it will happen anyway, just as I'm sure some families will find such a tool to be marvelously useful. I just wouldn't want to be the Real Daddy that both has to grieve for Real Mommy and kill the Digital Mommy his kids love.