Richard G. Epstein

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A Disturbing Book

About Virtual Parenting

$39.95

Art Sledgeway is best known as the chatty talk show host on National Public Radio. His program, "Green Ways" is considered an excellent forum for the discussion of environmental issues. He is less well known as the author of several undistinguished novels, numerous short stories, and an overly somber biography of Frederick Nietzche, which he published while still a graduate student at the University of Washington. In The Joys of Raising Virtual Children Mr. Sledgeway offers us a work that vacillates between investigative reporting and shrill advocacy. Yes, Virginia, there are people who actually prefer virtual children to real children, and Mr. Sledgeway is one of this strange breed. In the overly emotional final chapter in this book, Mr. Sledgeway confesses, or brags, that he has fathered (perhaps, spawned would be a more accurate term) numerous virtual children and his agenda is clearly to convince the rest of us to do the same.

It does not take a genius to know that this book is headed for best-seller status. Random House has taken great pains to market this book as a major publishing event. One ad in Publisher's Weekly hyperventilated: "The most awesome proposal concerning human reproduction since Adam and Eve begat Cain and Abel."

Mr. Sledgeway's book begins appropriately enough as a historical account of the phenomenon whereby human beings create virtual offspring of various kinds. Mr. Sledgeway also acts as a zoologist, carefully cataloguing the various kinds of virtual children that one can sire in this increasingly surreal culture of virtual reality and cyberspace.

Chapter One is devoted to the cyberpets and various forms of artificial life that first made their appearance in the 1990s, when I was just a young girl growing up outside Chicago. I remember the emotional attachment I experienced as I played with my first cyberpet, and then a succession of ever more sophisticated cyberpets, back in the 1990s. I can remember my first cyberpet, which took the form of a small egg, more clearly than I can remember our hapless Labrador, whose name was Clueless. These cyberpets were truly primitive by today's standards, yet it was easy to invest considerable emotional energy into the survival of such an entity, even back then. And that was the ultimate objective of a cyberpet, to keep it alive as long as possible.

I remember the extreme emotional distress that I experienced, at age 7, when my first cyberpet died. This happened at school, and I threw a terrible tantrum. My teacher, an incredibly boring mountain of a woman who magically came to life in a crisis, had to send me to the nurse's office and the nurse called for my parents. Even my parents couldn't console me from so grievous a loss.

Mr. Sledgeway is astonishing thorough in the early chapters of the book where he traces the evolution of virtual children from these primitive cyberpets. He also discusses the history of virtual life, simulations of virtual creatures with virtual genetic information, that mate and evolve in a cyberworld that offers challenges and opportunities of various kinds. These two technologies merged early in the 2000s with the introduction of cyberpets that had most of the properties of a real pet, albeit in a virtual sort of way. According to their manufacturers, these cyberpets were a form of virtual life, although even in high school the skeptic in me wondered how something could be both virtual and alive at the same time. To my teenage way of thinking life was just the opposite of virtual.

The first cyberchildren appeared at about that time, and by the early 2010s they had become quite sophisticated. These cyberchildren resided on the conventional computers of that time. The users of these systems were required to specify the characteristics of the parents, and the system would produce a virtual child based upon those specifications, in effect, implementing a form of cyber inheritance. Strangely enough, these cyberchildren were not primarily intended for entertainment. Their primary purpose was to teach teenagers, especially unwed and pregnant girls and their boyfriends, about how to be responsible parents. Mr. Sledgeway describes the success and failures of these early systems, including the famous cases during the 2010s, which I remember quite clearly, in which these same teenagers could not bond with their genuine offspring since they had become used to the predictable traits and behaviors of the cyberchildren that they had raised while in training for real parenthood. Instead of instilling good parenting skills, those early systems taught teenagers that genuine parenting is difficult and onerous.

In the late 2010s virtual reality almost entirely replaced the earlier cyberchildren that lived out their impoverished existence on a flat computer screen. These virtual reality cyberchildren, more commonly called virtual children, were reared in virtual reality. This required the awkward head gear and data gloves generally associated with the early days of that technology. The virtual parent could interact with these virtual children in virtual reality, feeding them, tending to their care, educating them, in a manner that became quite realistic. Whereas the systems in the 2000s and early 2010s were devoted almost entirely to teaching parenting skills, these new virtual reality systems were intended primarily for entertainment. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the public forced this evolution, away from virtual parenting as a form of education and towards virtual parenting as a form of amusement.

At the beginning of the 2020s virtual parenting systems became ever more sophisticated. Users of these new systems invested countless hours rearing their virtual children. Since these virtual children now had true artificial intelligence, including fully operational natural language capabilities, the virtual children of the early 2020s were capable of evolution both in terms of their intellectual development and their personalities. The original users of these systems, as Mr. Sledgeway documents with excruciating thoroughness, became quite devoted to developing children with a healthy personality and an admirable set of talents.

Some of these early virtual parenting systems were marketed as games in which the computer system kept score. In this way, the virtual parent could get some feedback on how he or she was doing. The virtual parent would accumulate points for each positive act of parenting and would lose points for every negative act of parenting. So, if you could raise a healthy virtual child with a positive self-image, you would score mightily, but if you raised an unhappy and neurotic virtual child, you would end up with a meager score. Mr. Sledgeway includes many quotes from virtual parents, reporting the joys of producing a wonder child and the sorrows and frustrations of producing a dysfunctional and maladjusted child.

Perhaps the most popular virtual parenting game of the early 2020s was WonderChild by Disney. While this was originally marketed as an opportunity to test and to develop one's REAL parenting skills, it unexpectedly became a tremendous fad when people realized it was devilish fun, in virtual reality, to produce twisted children, the more bizarre, the better. Users of WonderChild would spend countless hours trying to create the most neurotic and dysfunctional children imaginable. Then, they would invite their friends to interact with their deformed and demented virtual children in virtual reality. Showing off your twisted virtual children became all the rage.

Indeed, I can remember, back in 2023, when my husband and I packed up the kids to visit a cousin in Denver. When we arrived, my cousin couldn't wait until I put on a virtual reality helmet so that I could meet Cleaver, the virtual child that she had spent months producing. Cleaver was truly frightening, with tattoos all over his body, a large nose ring and assorted other body piercings, and bright orange hair. His wardrobe was straight out of a drug-dealing motorcycle gang. Cleaver had a brazen obscenity tattooed across his forehead and he was obviously packing heat under his denim jacket. When I emerged from the virtual reality literally shaking, my cousin said, "Isn't he cool?"

Mr. Sledgeway, as an avowed advocate of virtual parenting, is not as thorough as he should be in documenting the negative impact of this phenomenon in general and Disney's WonderChild, in particular. Although Disney did not expect that the users of WonderChild would intentionally try to create virtual children with twisted personalities and bizarre characteristics, WonderChild certainly was used in that way. This was the key to WonderChild's phenomenal commercial success.

Numerous studies that Mr. Sledgeway fails to cite in his book have established that the parenting skills learned in virtual reality do carry over into ordinary reality. I cannot, in this forum, review this growing body of scholarly research, but I think it is safe to say that some of the maladjustment we see in today's younger children can be blamed on their parents' exposure to WonderChild and similar virtual parenting systems. These studies show that there has been a measurable social cost to reducing parenting to a mindless game, a mere form of amusement.

Perhaps the worst feature of WonderChild and similar systems, which Mr. Sledgeway completely ignores except for a few paragraphs on page 345, is what happens to a virtual child once a virtual parent tires of rearing it. Obviously, the virtual child gets "deleted", to use the computer jargon. In a period of a few months, users of WonderChild might delete numerous offspring, in their effort either to produce the optimal "WonderChild", or as was more often the case, to produce the most twisted and distorted child imaginable, just for the hell of it. Whatever the virtual parent's objective, if his or her virtual child evolved in a direction that did not please the virtual parent, the virtual parent could simply delete that child and start again.

Many of the quotes from virtual parents that Mr. Sledgeway provides are chilling. It is clear from these quotes that raising virtual children is an intense experience that involves a tremendous emotional investment. One woman from Florida tells a heart-rending story of the virtual child she raised over an eight month period that was irretrievably lost in Hurricane Flora four years ago when her Miami subdivision lost power for several days. Quoting that poor woman from Florida: "After having invested over eight months of my time in developing a perfect child, I was just too demoralized to start all over again."

These testimonies alone are worth the price of admission, as they say, for someone like myself, who is interested in the sociology of virtual parenting. Unfortunately, not being an academic, Mr. Sledgeway is rather sloppy in presenting this material and one wishes that he had taken the pains to present these personal testimonies in a more systematic way. There is a great need for a systemic investigation into virtual parenting and its impact, but Mr. Sledgeway does not have the discipline to approach this subject in a rigorous manner.

Chapter twelve was both fascinating and the source of considerable annoyance. In this chapter Mr. Sledgeway presents testimonies from the virtual children themselves, including numerous children that were created using Disney's WonderChild. Mr. Sledgeway intentionally blurs the distinction between the real and the virtual and presents these testimonies as if the virtual children are real children. Some of these virtual children, especially those who were raised to be a "WonderChild" behave as if they have genuine love and gratitude towards their virtual parent. (Oh, yes, in Disney's WonderChild, you are the parent, neither a father nor a mother, since Disney's wonder children are not the result of sexual reproduction as much as verbal specifications given by the user.)

The testimonies of the virtual children are disturbing because one can feel, in these testimonies, why so many millions of people bought the WonderChild virtual reality during the early 2020s. (WonderChild is still being sold, but the latest version is integrated into cyberspace, allowing one to beget non-entities that roam cyberspace.) It is quite obvious that a lonely single person or someone who is stuck in an unhappy marital relationship, might turn to virtual children for emotional support, companionship, and for self-esteem. But, these virtual children are complete non-entities, using the technical term, so one wonders how a person can build self-esteem on the basis of a relationship that is mere nothingness at its core.

Chapter thirteen is Mr. Sledgeway's attempt to convince us that virtual parenting is a viable option for couples that are having difficulty bearing children. I found this chapter both maudlin and, ultimately, insulting. If my husband and I were childless, then we would certainly find little comfort in Mr. Sledgeway's prescription that we raise "virtual bundles of joy" to our hearts content, until our desire for bearing children would be "completely satisfied and fulfilled". In light of what modern medicine can accomplish in terms of helping childless couples, I found Mr. Sledgeway's advice inappropriate, misguided, and insensitive.

I found Mr. Sledgeway's failure to document the dark side of virtual parenting irresponsible. In this reviewer's opinion, none of the virtual reality entertainments developed in recent years, and there are tens of thousands of such systems, has done as much damage as WonderChild and other virtual parenting systems, because too many people, unstable and unhealthy in their human relationships, become addicted to the love that a virtual child can offer, and the result is human wreckage on a vast scale. So, it is difficult for me, as a reviewer, to treat Mr. Sledgeway's book with respect because I have seen the human wreckage that these systems create.

Today's systems are much more sophisticated than Disney's original WonderChild because we now have true parenting in cyberspace using self-projection technology. The array of virtual parenting systems that are now available is mind-boggling. The difference between the original WonderChild kind of system and today's true cyberspace system is that the virtual children produced in cyberspace can have one, two or even more parents. Furthermore, these virtual children have intelligence and can wander cyberspace freely or according to constraints placed upon them by their parents. Of course, all virtual children that are produced in cyberspace are, by definition, non-entities. The single greatest advance in this new technology is that virtual children can interact with the vast and rich environment provided by cyberspace. Thus, these virtual children are capable of fully human expression and personality development.

The actual production of virtual children in cyberspace takes a variety of forms. Parents can describe themselves (in cyberspace a child can have one, two, or more parents, as I mentioned earlier, but this point seems to deserve some emphasis) or they can submit actual genetic information, from which the computer system will produce a child based upon that genetic information.

Mr. Sledgeway devotes four chapters to cyberspace virtual parenting systems. Chapter fourteen is completely devoted to the life story of one virtual child who was produced by twelve people, the members of a sequestered jury in an infamous murder case. It seems that on evenings and on weekends, since the jury members were not allowed to watch television or discuss the case, the jury members jointly created a virtual child, which they continued to nurture for five weeks (bringing the child to the biological age of eighteen, since it is possible to speed things up in cyberspace). Interestingly, this virtual child turned out to be quite violent and had to be deleted just a few days before the jury reached its final verdict. Apparently, the emotional frustrations inherent in being on a sequestered jury in a well-publicized murder case manifested in the personality of the jury's joint progeny.

Chapter fifteen presents the biographies of seven "outstanding" virtual children. Each of these virtual children attained to genuine human accomplishments. For example, one of these children proved a significant theorem in mathematics, and another produced brilliant poetry that her (its?) virtual parents actually published in a respected literary journal. (Mr. Sledgeway reveals that the editors of that journal did not realize that the poetry was written by a non-entity.)

All seven of these children are still alive since none of their virtual parents have had the heart to delete them. Said one parent of the afore-mentioned poet, "Emily is like the daughter I wish my real daughter could have been, a gifted child with literary talent. My real daughter is a pharmacologist, you know, with the big house in the suburbs and all of that. Damn, who cares about money? What I always wanted was a daughter who could write, who could be an artist. I guess it's a matter of priorities." So now, if your real children don't measure up to your expectations, you can instill a sense of worthlessness and guilt in them by bringing up the subject of your eminently successful and talented virtual children!

In chapters sixteen and seventeen, Mr. Sledgeway discusses the future of virtual parenting. I can summarize these rather depressing chapters in a few words: Virtual parenting will become ever more realistic in the years ahead as cyberspace transitions from its current almost cartoon-like images to life-like images that will be difficult to distinguish from ordinary reality. Mr. Sledgeway obviously can hardly wait for the advent of these more realistic virtual parenting systems, but he is just as eager to convince us not to wait, but to develop our virtual parenting skills now, despite the relatively primitive nature of current technology.

Chapter eighteen is Mr. Sledgeway's hysterical polemic, which is a blatant attempt to convince the reader that virtual parenting is better than actual parenting. Quoting Mr. Sledgeway: "I think it is safe to assert that the virtual parent can learn much more in much less time and with much less frustration than the real parent." As the mother of three wonderfully real children I must say, "Oh, really!"

Mr. Sledgeway argues passionately that virtual parenting is an actual path to personal fulfillment and happiness "without those two o'clock baby feedings that are associated with actual parenting", again quoting him. I suppose that he wrote this with a straight face, for, this is the sort of book that posits something so ridiculous, that one hopes until the very end that the author will finally reveal himself, confessing that it has all been a delightfully sly practical joke. Unfortunately, Mr. Sledgeway remains unsmiling to the bitter end.

And a bitter end it is, when Mr. Sledgeway pulls out his credentials as an environmentalist, something for which I have long admired Mr. Sledgeway, as the host of radio's most environmentally sensitive program. Mr. Sledgeway's final argument in favor of virtual parenting is on the grounds that, quoting him, "as the earth's resources dwindle because of our growing population, it is time for us to seriously contemplate the creation of a virtual biosphere, in parallel with the natural biosphere, which will allow us to express our paradisical dreams." Further, he states that "the virtual biosphere will have virtual parenting as its central virtue, and in that central virtue millions if not billions of people will be able to enjoy the joys of parenting without (emphasis mine!) polluting and further destroying the natural environment."

Maybe the people at Random House are right. This is a historical book! It is a reflection of where technology has taken us. Perhaps the unintended message of this book is that we are losing contact with the natural world that gave birth to us.

Happy Mother's Day.