Shh! I’m Hunting Wabbits.

Scholars disagree about the number of books in the Library at Alexandria when it was destroyed some 2300 years ago last Thursday. Estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 volumes. Even using the larger guess, an approximation of the sum total of accrued information available to the most learned academicians of antiquity is equivalent to the number of bytes contained in a video depicting a man inadvertently falling off the end of a dock into a lake.

To have access to the sum total of human knowledge of philosophy, literature, and mathematics, traveling through the Egyptian desert is no longer necessary. A few mouse clicks will suffice. As Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says, “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.”

And that’s a good thing. But gallumphing down the information highway has an unintended and heartrending consequence: no more absurd arguments, no more bar fights.

Everybody knows that the Yankees have appeared in and won more World Series games than any other team in the history of the MLB. But who is in second place in October appearances?

Before we all came to rely on Wikipedia, I would have said Dodgers; you might have said Pirates, and we could have had an engaging evening spouting vociferously:

“The Dodgers beat the Milwaukee Braves in seven games in 1959!”

“No, they didn’t, you nimrod,” you could respond. “That was 1958 and they LOST to the Braves!”

The conversation could degenerate gloriously from there with spirited cries of “Braves are terrible!” and “The Dodgers leaving Brooklyn heralded the end of civilization!”

Subsequently, we could “settle things” by shoving one another in an alley or threatening to tell one another’s parents how the dent in the door of their 1967 Dodge Dart actually got there. Good times.

And the brawl need not end at closing time. I knew guys in college who have been arguing for generations about the 1908 Cubs or whether Anne Boleyn was the one who died or was divorced.

Consider an even more glorious situation from the following lyric:

I hit him hard right between the eyes

And he went down, but to my surprise,

He come up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear.

So I busted a chair right across his teeth

And we crashed through the wall and into the street

Kicking and a gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer.

In 2016, a quick Internet search will determine a potential ancestor’s location; a paternity test is inexpensive and accurate. There is no need to go to Gatlinburg in mid-July.

A few clicks will identity of the team with the second most World Series wins (St. Louis, as it happens.) And that Anne Boleyn was executed. Tragic really. The death of that nice woman and the fact that all arguments can be settled without threats of physical harm.

The point is that accessing information is no longer an issue for our children. Being inundated and overwhelmed with information is.

Your children don’t need more stimulus; they need less. Your children need quiet, they need time for reflection, they need someone–preferably everyone–to hush up for an hour or two so that they can think, reflect, and regroup. In the library at Alexandria, your kids could choose what book to read; today they are unprotected from what they don’t want exactly when they don’t need it.

Everyone reading my newsletter has been exposed to salespeople who never shut up and are, therefore, ineffectual. We have been harangued by telemarketers who are trained not to allow us to interrupt long enough to say, “Please delete me from this calling list.” Job applicants who talk about themselves incessantly never get hired. The four most important words of sales are “Shut the f*** up!”

And dating? Don’t get me started. Nobody wants to go out with the person who spends the entire evening blathering incessantly about accomplishments large and small: “And then after successfully completing the merger and acquisition, I went skiing in Switzerland and could I have that dressing on the side?”

Check, please.

So let’s divide out communication with our kids into two distinct groups, those messages that are about us as opposed to those that allow the kids to be heard. In the first group, in which the parent is the one speaking, a tremendous flood of information washes over the kid: “Don’t forget to put your cleats in the car because after you finish your math homework, we’re going to swing by your grandmother’s house to drop off the lasagna.” Nothing wrong with soccer, algebra, or mozzarella, but what a lot of words for many ten year olds.

Open ended questions offer kids the opportunity to reflect. As does silence. Surely there can be one hour, maybe even ALL the hours after 8:00 at night, when there is an end to texting, Google, Internet, and email. Imagine a home in which everyone-that means you too, mom-puts the electronics aside.

In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe writes cogently about a trained fighter pilot who is so overwhelmed with stimulus-he is talking on the radio, firing machine guns, taking evasive action, and trying to keep himself and his crew from being blown to bits after all-that he doesn’t hear his co-pilot screaming that there are incoming missiles. Is it possible that your kids are similarly stunned with information and that is why they forget to take the trash buckets to the street on Mondays and Thursdays?

The Buddha teaches, “Wait for the question.” Shouldn’t we allow our children the peace and quiet and the psychic space to come up with a query or two?

(For the chronically irony impaired, let it be stated unequivocally that this author is violently anti-violence.)