I'm taking a break from my normal fare to speak as a parent, to other parents.
This is Brooke and Brooke is 6 years old (and no she's not one of mine)
"Alexa ordered me a dollhouse and cookies,” Brooke explained to CBS 11
Yes I was in fact inspired to write this because Brooke asked Alexa to "order me a dollhouse and cookies," and that's just what Alexa did. A KidKraft Sparkle Mansion dollhouse to be exact, which costs about $170, and a tin of Royal Dansk sugar cookies, both of which arrived within a day or so.
What makes this newsworthy, and in my case, blog worthy, is that unfortunately, Alexa isn't a mischievous friend, or an older sibling, or even a local babysitter. In fact Alexa isn't flesh and blood at all. Alexa is a household virtual assistant service, built into Amazon's Echo device
Her parents only found out about the purchase when it arrived on their doorstep, much to the chagrin of her parents.
Yet this is the future of parenting!
Imagine your home filled with devices, toys and furnishings that respond to your child's every whim.
It's rapidly becoming a reality.
But at what cost?
In the case of the Neitzel family, the cost was $170 and a lesson learned to set a PIN on the virtual home assistant.
This is hardly the first time this has happened in recent years.
Consider the case of the 10 year old who ordered $10k worth of smurf berries through a video game, or the 14 month old who bought a vintage sports car on ebay by banging away at an unattended laptop.
These are humorous, somewhat costly mistakes that remind us not to lend our cellphones, tablets and other connected gadgets to the little carpet biters in our lives.
But are unexpected credit card bills the real cost of our always on 24/7 connected lives?
As our technology becomes more and more an extension of ourselves, we rely upon it to provide companionship and entertainment for not only ourselves, but those closest to us. We do this without so much as a second thought, but...
Perhaps we should spare it some thought?
By relying upon these devices to provide companionship and entertainment to our children, we're robbing them of the most important thing we can give them,
Our time!
Countless studies demonstrate time and time again that the single most important factor in a child's success in later life is simple parental involvement. The more time and interaction a child has with their mother, father, siblings and first order relatives the more confident and secure they become and this translates into success later in life.
This is one reason why government child protective services have begun to focus their efforts more on healing the family unit, than on removing the child from the home except in cases of imminent danger.
Why then are these "labor saving" devices, being used to save us from our most important labor? And for what purpose?
Tired and exhausted from the day?
Very important work must be done at home to meet a deadline tomorrow*
Want to binge watch netflix, child doesn't want to watch the same show, toss them the tablet and let them play games
Got friends over, don't want the kids interrupting so you tell them to go play video games?
I know it's difficult, but how valid are any of those reasons in the grand scheme of things really?
When I was a kid we had this giant thing to play with, it was called the outdoors.
Now days we live in such a state of constant fear that it's increasingly strange to hear the squeals of joy as children run and play in the park while their parents play and engage with them. In fact, generally if you do see children in the park and their parents are present at all, the parent is engaged in other tasks such as catching up on the latest happenings on facebook.
That's if you're lucky enough to even find a family out there. Now days even kindergartners have smartphones they are engrossed in 24/7. My own wife 
I'm sorry, I know this sounds like a guilt trip. I'm extremely guilty of this myself and it's my own inner reflections that are driving me to reach out with this.
What we're doing as a society isn't right, we're robbing an entire generation of their own ability to become caring parents. In fact the blase,blase, disconnected, jaded, "me! me! me!" attitude of both Gen X and the Millennials may be a direct result of our own well meaning parents, deciding that the glowing babysitter was best suited to raising us when we were kids.
And what has been the result of this?
We have entire generations now where ADD and even Asperger's and Autism have become common place.
Suicides, cyber bullying, and even just an inability to form lasting relationships.
Isn't some of this increase in mental health problems, due to better diagnostics and broader awareness?
Of course!
But not all of it, not even half of it.
The fact is that none of these devices we subject our children to constantly are warm and caring, they are cold, distant, mechanical. As a result we are raising children who are becoming cold, distant and mechanical.
It's true we as a species are colder and more distant than our parents were.
So maybe it's time to pull the plug on our always on connected lives!
I urge every parent here to take the #lightsout challenge!
Set aside a single day each week where all the electronics in the home are off the minute they step in the door. This means shut off the cell phones, tablets, home assistants, TV's video games and every other distraction. Then pull out the board games, some books, crayons whatever and spend the entire time together as a family. Talk, laugh, enjoy! Heck scream, shout and holler if you need the catharis. The point is to be a real human family for at least one day each week, then you can revert to your cyberlife the very next day.
Mondays seem to be better for this because Mondays always suck and you'll have lots of things to talk about.
To complete the challenge create a post here on steemit the following day, tag it #lightsout and tell us all about it. I can't promise you any prizes, but you'll get my upvote.
Most importantly you'll get to know your family again.
This post is 100% Steem Powered!