About twenty years ago, a few municipalities had the good idea of giving every newborn their first book. An excellent initiative, but it still relied on parents to read it to them. And what about those who do not read French? You can look at the pictures, you may say. But a baby comes into the world with an irresistible desire to transform it. And one of the first means available to do so is to leave traces. They run a finger through a substance, move it about, look at the effect and take delight in it. My psychology thesis, defended in 1983 (and partly taken up in my book Psychanalyse de la bande dessinée, published in 1987), was about nothing else.
But today, who still buys pencils and paper for children to draw with? In 2003, in Les Bienfaits des images, I observed that many families prefer to put their child in front of the television, and I asked them to let the child at least use the remote control, to give back the active role that paper encourages so well and that television destroys by turning the child into a mere spectator of what they see on the screen. Those who have dissected the twenty or so books I have devoted to screens found in these few lines the only angle from which it seemed possible to attack me, by making me say what I have never said, and what everything I have written explicitly contradicts: praise of television for babies! I advise anyone who comes across these few lines quoted to turn to the whole book, which was, incidentally, awarded the Stassart Prize by the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. They will discover that those who wanted to discredit me in this way have in fact created their own page of shame and bad faith.
Today, some parents think they give their child back an active role by putting them in front of digital tools rather than a television. But that confuses the free movement of the hand with the gesture of rubbing a screen with a fingertip.
In other families, the situation is far worse: the first pencils appear in the home only on the day the parents are asked to buy some as part of school supplies.
At 3-6-9-12, we propose that every child born should be given a ream of paper and a box of coloured pencils. And that GPs and paediatricians should give all parents this advice: buy paper and pencils for your babies!
S.T.
Serge Tisseron is a psychiatrist, a doctor of psychology qualified to supervise research, a member of the Académie des technologies and an associate researcher at Université Paris VII Denis Diderot (CRPMS).
