The Price
of a Yes

Gen X and millennial parents are trying to prepare our children for a world we once only knew from science fiction. Give us a break.

I am in a bit of a rut with my youngest son and Robux™—the fictional currency of Roblox™ that is, in the only way that matters at our house, not fictional at all. It is his preferred reward. I have trouble saying no. When I do say no, it can feel to both of us as though I am withholding something bigger than a purchase. It feels, embarrassingly, like I am denying love.

That is a lot to ask of a blue square.

I waited a long time for these babies. I had my first at forty and my youngest at forty-three. Then the pandemic arrived, just as we had three preschoolers and two adults trying to work from home. We were running a small, loud, badly provisioned country. Zoom school happened in the same rooms where we were trying to answer emails, make lunch, find a clean shirt, and locate the emotional fortitude to attend one more meeting about nothing.

Screen-time limits went out the window. Not because we had abandoned our values, but because our values had met an emergency. Every little interval of focus was jealously guarded. A show was not simply a show. A game was not simply a game. A device was sometimes the only available route to finishing a sentence.

We were hardly alone. In 2021, Pew found that 72% of parents of school-age children said their kids were spending more time in front of screens than before the pandemic, and 39% said they had become less strict about non-school screen time.1 That does not absolve me of every purchase in this receipt. It does make the familiar story of parental failure feel too thin.

I am not a mother who loves back-to-school. I like having my not-so-small babies nearby. I like the running commentary, the snacks, the interrupting questions, the way a household can feel less like a schedule than a small weather system. But I also crave the minutes when they are finally back in the rhythm of attending school and I am allowed to sit alone with a thought until it finishes becoming itself.

Of course they come home tired. School is a long day of rules, noise, performance, focus, social weather, fluorescent light, and other people’s feelings. I can barely last an hour when I visit. I understand the wish to come home and couch rot in peace. I do not think rest needs a moral defence.

We have a new currency rule in the house: anything that involves not being on screens is a yes. A water park? Yes. A new bike? Yes. A friend coming over? A bookstore? Yes. Before the pandemic, the rule was that anything outdoors or sports-related was a yes. Somewhere along the way, the rule widened. Which is, unfortunately, how we got into this situation with Robux.

Robux became another form of relief, another way to say: I see that you worked hard today; I understand that you want something; I am glad to be the person who can give it to you.

The problem is not that my son is unusually interested in money. The problem is that he is learning money in a form designed to feel like participation.

Robux is not cash, exactly, and it is not cryptocurrency. It is closed-platform money: Roblox says it can be bought only from the company or approved retailers and spent only inside its platform. The company keeps a portion of transactions and distributes the rest to creators.2 In other words, my child is already moving through a real economy with prices, sellers, status goods, access, aspiration, creators, fees, and a very efficient way of making the adult cost disappear behind a number that does not look like a number.

That does not make Roblox uniquely sinister. It makes it legible. The platform is a small lesson in a much larger world: money becomes easier to spend when it becomes easier to see as something else. A new outfit for an avatar, special access to an experience, a private server, a boost—these are not just objects. They are social weather. They answer the old human questions: Who gets to be included? What can I make? What can I show? What might I become if I had just a little more?

Small worlds, big questions

Then there is Minecraft™. Minecraft is where my unease gets weird enough that I have to make fun of myself before anybody else does.

Many of these online worlds seem to contemplate, if not require, a kind of serfdom. In Minecraft’s survival mode, you mine and chop and farm and breed and build and upgrade and, if you are sufficiently invested, create elaborate systems that make the next round of labour less annoying. It is a soft-focus resource-extraction simulator with excellent landscaping. One minute the child is building a cozy village; the next, there is an industrial crop operation, a trading hall, and what appears to be a small but efficient class system.

Is that weird? Yes. Is it a reason to panic? Probably not.

Serfdom requires a lord, and Minecraft does not really provide one. The more accurate observation is that children are playing with tiny models of work, property, scarcity, extraction, trade, engineering, and leisure. Some of those models are old as dirt. Some are distinctly platform-era. They are not politically neutral simply because they arrive in pixels, but neither do they turn a child into a future robber baron by Tuesday.

Still, it is fair to notice what our children are rehearsing, just as it is fair to notice what they are not. Who does the repetitive work in a game world? What counts as success? Is the goal to accumulate, to build, to cooperate, to defend, to make something beautiful, to escape the survival loop altogether? These are not accusations disguised as after-school questions. They are questions about the stories beneath the game.

At this point I sound exactly like somebody’s parent worrying about heavy metal and Dungeon & Dragons™. And let’s be honest: we all know former D&D nerds who are now killing it in the tech industry, which may either reassure us or make the case more complicated.

It should probably reassure us a little. Imagination has a long record of becoming a skill before adults understand its market value. Playing a bard in a basement, building a strange fortress out of digital blocks, learning the etiquette of a game’s guild, making a video about a game: these can involve systems thinking, collaboration, aesthetics, social navigation, storytelling, and problem-solving. None of that makes every hour on a screen inherently good, or every online game a school. But it does mean that “screen time” is a blunt category for a very strange, varied, increasingly consequential terrain.

Some children genuinely may grow up to be professional players, streamers, game designers, editors, online performers, or TikTok™ creators. It sounds a little awful when said with the tone of a parent who remembers payphones. Girl Scouts™ once prepared us for a future we imagined would contain more opportunities for preparing food over an open flame.

Our children may need a different set of tools, alongside the old ones. They may need to understand games and platforms, yes, but also how to recognize disinformation, resist it, care for people who get left behind by a system, and identify oligarchy when it asks to be called innovation. They may need to distinguish an answer from an authority, a recommendation from an ad, a world from a platform, and a person from a brand.

That is a larger ambition than simply reducing the number of minutes on a device.

It is also a strangely impossible assignment for parents. Gen X and millennial parents are trying to prepare our children for a world we once only knew from science fiction. Give us a break.

We grew up with payphones and dot-matrix printers. We watched the internet arrive and the phone become, in quick succession, our camera, office, marketplace, teacher, babysitter, alarm, public square, and a way to feel bad about our kitchens. Our children watched us work and educate remotely while the adults in charge, as recently as 2019, said that much of this could not be done. I suspect a generation that saw school and work happen at home will have very little patience for mandatory commuting and forced in-person interaction merely because someone in a corner office misses fluorescent lighting. That is a prediction, not a policy paper. But it is not a wild one.

The old dream, the new grammar

Our children are growing up inside a particular grammar of success. The old dream had clearer furniture: a secure union job, a house that did not feel impossible, a book that became a bestseller, a career that deepened over time. The newer dream is more platform-shaped. Become a YouTube™ streamer with a million subscribers. Build the cleverest app. Make something that scales while you sleep. Become free from work, money worry, and the tedious business of asking anyone for permission.

For centuries, ordinary people have wanted some version of the same thing: fewer hours under compulsion; more safety; more leisure; more time to care for one another, make things, learn things, lie in the grass, and occasionally do nothing at all. I do not mean a future without purpose, contribution, or responsibility. I mean a future in which humans are less beholden to meaningless toil and to the people who profit from it. If automation and AI make that future even partially reachable, our aspiration should be to share the gain—not to train our children more efficiently for another two hundred years of fealty to oligarchs.

Marshall McLuhan, who saw the psychological consequences of technology more clearly than most people who use the word “future” for a living, wrote of automation that its new patterns of human association “tend to eliminate jobs,” but that, positively, automation “creates roles for people.”3 The second half of that sentence matters. The future is not necessarily a place where nobody works. It may be a place where work changes its costume more quickly than our institutions, schools, labour laws, or family imaginations can keep up.

The International Labour Organization’s 2025 analysis found that one in four workers globally is in an occupation with some exposure to generative AI. Its central conclusion is less cinematic than the headlines: because most jobs contain tasks that still require human input, transformation is more likely than blanket replacement.4 As a technology-enabled lawyer, I do not find that abstract. There are tasks that once took a week, or a team, or the slightly haunted patience of a junior associate, that can now be drafted, sorted, compared, or summarized in a fraction of the time.

The work is not gone. But its centre of gravity has shifted. The question is no longer only, Can you do the task? It is increasingly, Can you tell whether the task was done well? Can you see what was missed? Can you take responsibility for the judgment?

Ethan Mollick describes the new agentic systems as “wizards”: powerful outputs, opaque processes, and a human being left to decide what to trust.5 Kate Crawford offers a different corrective: “AI is neither artificial nor intelligent.” It is material, extractive, dependent on labour, and shaped by people’s choices—even when it makes itself look like magic.6

What we can actually give them

That is why imagination matters. So does collective care. So does a child’s sense that systems are made by people and can be remade by people. These are not side quests for the children of the future. They may be the work.

And still: we do not know the future. Neither did our parents, though they may have looked more confident in shoulder pads. We cannot adequately prepare our children for something we can only imagine. We can only protect the conditions in which they can become themselves during the very short years we get to call childhood: bodily safety, rest, friendship, boredom, play, conversation, affection, privacy, books, schoolyards, family meals, the occasional water park, and enough room to fail without becoming a cautionary tale.

The developmental psychologist and media scholar Sonia Livingstone says, beautifully and inconveniently, that “the phone can be both the problem and the solution.”7 That feels truer to me than the tidy old war between good parents and bad screens. The American Academy of Pediatrics has moved away from treating screen time as a single universal number. Its Family Media Plan emphasizes the child, the content, what media may be crowding out, and ongoing communication rather than a one-size-fits-all rule.8

The kids are going to kid

Which brings me to the constant stream of shoulds. The accusations. The ambient judgment from people who have not parented anything more complicated than a guinea pig, and occasionally from parents who have. Who is sending all these messages? Are mothers and fathers really this mean to one another and to ourselves?

Let’s lay that down. Let’s do that together.

The kids are going to kid. They are going to want ridiculous little blue icons because, inconveniently, they want what we all want: ease, novelty, status, friendship, escape, mastery, and somewhere soft to land after a hard day. They are also, slowly and rather inconveniently, becoming people with their own tastes, instincts, and decisions. We have to let them flex those muscles sometime—probably sooner than we want to.

Maybe the screen-time debate is one of the relatively safe places to practise. What is the harm, really? It is not as if they are smoking cigarettes behind the Cow Palace. I say this with particular authority, because that is how I exercised my own self-determination skills at twelve.

There is a cost to forcing a child into every parental ideal. There is a cost to making every small preference a referendum on our love, and every screen a moral failure. We can hold the boundaries that keep a household functional, use a budget when it helps, and talk about what money means. But perhaps the greater task is to make room for the little decisions before they become big ones. No to Robux can still be no; it just does not need to be a lesson about the child’s character. Yes can still be yes; it does not have to be proof of love.

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “Technology is the active human interface with the material world.”9 I love that because it removes the false choice between raising children for technology and raising them away from it. A bicycle is technology. A library is technology. A kitchen is technology. A screen is technology. The question is never simply whether to permit it. The question is what relationship we are making with it, and whether we are still allowed to shape the terms.

My youngest son does not need a mother who has solved the future. He needs a mother who can say: I understand why this matters to you. I understand why you want to switch off after a long day. I understand that the world you are growing into has currencies I am still learning to read.

And sometimes, sweetheart, the answer is still no.

Not because I want to return us to payphones and dot-matrix printers, although I would be happy to make anyone who romanticizes the past wait beside a payphone in February.

The answer is no because love cannot be measured in Robux. But neither can love be measured by how successfully we force our children to conform to ideals designed for an economy and a reality that have already begun to pass.

The future where they work less—or work differently, or share the gains of technology more fairly—is not something I am willing to stop imagining. It may be in reach. Let’s aim for that. In the meantime, let’s keep the house a place where they can grow, and let’s not destroy our days, our seasons, or our bonds trying to turn childhood into a rehearsal for a past that is already leaving.

Then, ideally, we put on our shoes and go somewhere that does not require a password.

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Reading notes

Sources I kept close.

• Pew Research Center, “Parents, their children and school during the pandemic”.
• Roblox™ Corporation, 2024 Form 10-K.
• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
• International Labour Organization, Generative AI and Jobs.
• Ethan Mollick, “On Working with Wizards”.
• Kate Crawford, “AI is neither artificial nor intelligent”.
• Sonia Livingstone, “Young children’s digital lives”.
• American Academy of Pediatrics, “The Family Media Plan”.
• Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Rant About Technology”.