Washington – In a recent Washington Post article about raising kids in the digital age, freelance writer Allison Slater Tate called GenX parents pioneers who had “the last of the truly low–tech childhoods, and now we are among the first of the truly high–tech parents.”
She writes about trying to point out scenery to her carpool of 12–year–olds, but “no one in the car looks up. They are all looking down at their phones, playing games with each other, texting a friend or watching a YouTube video. Sometimes, if I am lucky, I will get a mercy grunt out of one or two of them in reply.”
I share her generational quandary. But my own approach with my kids goes something like this: “Sharquisha! Raytangelo! [names changed] put the damn phone down and pay attention to the damn trees and damn water!”
It’s not for the lily–livered, but bright–line rules can feel like the only things that work with kids and technology.
When my 20–year–old was a teenager, I once told her to put the phone down in the car and she insisted that her friend might think she was rude if she didn’t respond immediately. “Well, I’m sitting right next to you, and I think you’re being rude,” I told her.
I had already started the broad strokes of my kid–tech policy with an easy one: No phones at the table. Not just for my kids, but for kids who sit at my table, or any table where I’m paying for the food. But from that day on, it was also no phone in the car, or at least not without permission. No iPod either – ‘cause if I’m driving, we all get to share a cabin experience. Good if they love my car radio choices, but nothing tragic if they don’t.
My parents listened to light ‘70s rock every morning before work and school, and the experience wired me to break into song as I drive. “Even though we ain’t got money/I’m so in love with you, honey...” Sing it, Mommy.
A 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation study found that nearly a third of children ages 8 to 10 have phones, nearly 70 percent of kids ages 11 to 14 do, along with 85 percent of those ages 14 to 17. The research on what precisely these devices do to kids’ brains is lagging.
But even though I don’t know what’s happening in their heads, I do know that there’s a finite amount of time in which I’ll be in the car with my children and be able to tell them to look out the window. Where they will see what I see, or I will translate for them my takeaway points. They’ll register it in the moment or come back to it later. Or even if we butt heads, they’ll remember my idiosyncrasies (and it will add to my legend) much more than whatever forgettable text they were about to read.
I’m worried not just about their brains, but their souls – and I base this on my own wiring.
I once visited a woman who had covered nearly every surface and wall space in her home with art. The effect was dizzying. When I stood up in her living room, I thought I was going to faint. An art expert acquainted me with the term for her compulsion, “horror vacui,” or fear of the empty. Her need to fill every space left me feeling unbalanced – as if too many things were speaking to me at once, and I didn’t have enough white space in between to process.
I find it a useful metaphor. I cannot live without digital boundaries. I am simply not wired to handle the incoming constantly. I have to stop processing sometimes even if etiquette says otherwise. My head needs white space (or at least this is the argument I hope will prevail when I tell my editors I don’t know my Twitter password).
This might seem fringy (my ex-husband told me I should try to avoid being the weird mother on the block), but there can be appropriate friction when new meets old – put the damn phone down! – until more thoughtful approaches catch up. It’s not true only of technology. And it’s not something to think about only with kids.
Washington Post