Digital-Era Parenting

Parenting isn’t easy, but this is new territory we never learned to navigate through our parents’ examples. Will play dates involve actual playing or virtual playing? Will going to the library result in browsing for great books or salivating over the shoulder of another boy playing Roblox? Will owning a device at home mean giving our kids access to some middle ground or forever quarreling over how much is too much?

My husband and I have always erred on the side of restriction. Thank goodness we’ve been on the same page when it comes to how we want to parent. Ever since our older son was a baby, the only media I let into his life was Baby Einstein videos. Fairly sparingly, at that. We had cable but I accepted motherhood to mean that it was my role to set an example in every life area. I curtailed my own already-meager TV-watching to a half-hour of a cooking show now and then while nursing. The sounds of a friendly person doing homey life activities in our living room.

Once our son got older, we gradually allowed only very specific types of TV-watching – documentaries and positive or educational types of animated shows. You know, Word World, Peep and the Big Wide World, and Wild Kratts kinds of things. Half an hour here and there. We didn’t ever allow anything harsh, nor did we allow shows that seemed benign yet displayed attitudes of sarcasm or unfriendliness. Showing positive attitudes about life and people have always been paramount to us when it comes to media.

I must stop for a second because this all sounds so sheltered, right?

I feel the way I do because growing up, I was exposed to so much I didn’t need to know. I watched gobs of TV. Tons of movies. Unrestricted. Sex, violence, Faces of Death, you name it. I remember watching The Exorcist with my family when I was about 8, I stumbled upon someone’s porn magazines when I was about the same age, listened to stories about 8th graders having sex when I was in 6th grade, was given pot brownies when I was a busser without being told what was in them, and watched lots of nice kids end up trying lots of not-so-nice things in their lives just to impress their peers. There was little innocence in the social atmospheres of junior high, high school, and college. Between media and school, a kid’s innocence will be short-lived if no one is intent on guarding it. Back to the story…

As our kids have aged, I have continued to set an example I think is appropriate in these digital times. I have always had a personal rule that since I’m a stay-at-home mom, there’s no reason my kids should see me distracted on a device. My role in life is to have time for them when the rest of the world is busy. To converse with them about life, accompany them in their explorations, and work through the struggles of parenting that aren’t fun for me or for them. It is not to bury myself in hobbies, squeeze them into a little of my time, entertain myself during low points, or busy myself with outside obligations. So whenever I’ve wanted to be on the computer, I’ve done it once they’re in bed. Or I haven’t done it all, since that’s my only time to hang out with just my husband. It has been much to the chagrin of others. More than a few people have expressed their irritation that I don’t routinely check my email. I don’t explain myself to everyone; I just let it go. Since I have been given the gift of staying home, the most important thing I can do with my life is be present and unhurried for my family.

Our older son is almost a teenager now and has only seen one or two PG-13 movies. I’m still cautious about the attitudes and dialogue in PG movies. At this point, he doesn’t really know cuss words. When he was in 1st grade, he got in trouble for repeating S-E-X when another student was spelling it and laughing, but came home asking what it meant because he had no idea why he got in trouble for spelling three letters. I told him what it meant in the context of salmon and bears, hoping he wouldn’t want further explanations closer to our species for several years.

A year ago, he asked me what the “f” word in front of “Trump” meant that was graffitied on a port-a-potty at Buck Park. He was in 5th grade and being homeschooled, so I decided I wanted to be the one to tell him what “bad words” are. I think he thought all along that a “bad word” was something that wasn’t an upbeat word, rather than crass words that aren’t polite for everyday language. I wanted to be the one he relied on for accurate information, and I decided then and there that I’d rather him learn these from me than learn them in a caddy environment from shakily-informed peers. I don’t think he even remembers them now.

So curtailing our children’s exposure to things we think aren’t positive for their psychological development has been at the forefront of our parenting all along. I don’t even like when we visit my mom and see commercials in between a show she’s watching; we never got cable when we moved to the island, so commercials are a novelty for our kids. But this new world around us where we’re inundated with technology is troubling to me. Our older son loves technology. He learns it like rapid-set concrete and gobbles it up. We somewhat reluctantly let him earn money from working to buy an iPod in order to take photos on our trip to Africa in April, and since then he has figured out unbelievable things about that little gadget. He’s in hog heaven, making movie trailers of home videos with his brother, taking beautiful photos, and figuring out things like how to have his own free phone number from somewhere in Texas. Policing racier things is never an issue. And because he helps senior citizens learn how to use and fix their own technology, he happened to be gifted a new, beautiful, black Dell computer by a very generous lady who didn’t use it much and wanted it to go to a good home where it would be cherished. Cherished it is.

Here’s the problem. Even though our sons have only gotten one hour of video game time each Saturday for Minecraft during this past school year – and it’s the first thing they lose out on if they don’t comply with life at our house, so they’ve lost out on as many Saturdays as they’ve gotten – it’s the underlying psychological stuff that is unsettling to me. While Minecraft is very tame, the problem is that there is no end to it. It is instantly gratifying and it can go on forever. Between the desire to want to do more Minecraft and the pull to be on his iPod, our son’s devices have caused more discord in our lives than ever before in our household. More laying down of the law. More raised voices. More lengthy conversations about how we should trust him with this stuff. The problem is, it’s not him I don’t trust. It’s the beast itself. The pull of these instantly gratifying, purposely addicting forms of solitary entertainment that go nowhere and teach nothing. The wanting of hours to spend on that nothingness in place of catching dragonflies, building forts, and running through the forest. The desire to fill the brain with emptiness rather than build the kind of character that comes from chopping wood or digging postholes. The keenness to be in virtual worlds rather than gaining real skills in case they’re actually needed someday.

The digital age is a very real thing that will change the world as we know it, so there are definite plusses to allowing kids time with technology. I don’t mean video games or social media. I mean skill-building with programming, coding, AutoCADding, Khan Academying, Photoshopping, etc. I fully realize the fact that kids today will need technology skills never imagined in the past. They will inherit a world that requires them to create wildly new technology and improvise with technology to save our world from the past’s mistakes. In fact, I’ve always felt that there should be technical academies for kids who came out of the womb wanting to be engineers. Our son has craved learning real-world mechanical skills since he was three.

Since places like that don’t exist, at least around us, computers are exceedingly interesting to this 12-year-old. So far, we haven’t let him go off any deep end. And oh, how our son would love to be allowed the chance to go off the deep end. And stay there. He still does all of that nature exploration. He builds little electric boats from scratch. He thinks up fantastic little (and big) inventions. And he has worked for a couple on and off for the past year, doing physical labor on their land that tires him out. Like cutting wood, hauling rocks, stacking branches, digging holes, you name it. I love it. We can’t dream up enough physical jobs on our property for more than a day or two, but they have plenty. Not only that, they have him in for lunch and converse together at the table. It’s so much deeper than plain work. Bob and Iris offer relationship with him. Kind of like surrogate grandparents that magically entered his life.

I decided that since it’s summer, I’d let our son just go for it for a couple of days for the heck of it. How I’d love if someone gave me the golden key to write all day long. Or walk and read all day long. Or travel all month long. Why not let him indulge for once in his life? So I allowed it. For two days, all day long each day, he was coding Minecraft, “learning” all the while about coding. Hmm. Something in me didn’t sit well at all. Then, on a night I went to my mom’s for a date, instead of having “boys’ night in” with my husband and a movie, our sons watched this thing that our older son found called “Minecraft: How to Train Your Dragon.” It’s two guys in the UK who walk you through Minecraft on YouTube and chat about all the different things you could do at every turn. It’s like hanging out in the living room with two nice chaps as they chat about dragons and blocks. It’s like watching paint dry, to me. Can’t be that bad, right? Hmm. Then I began to see how over the next few days it was all our kids talked about, all they went to bed at night thinking about, and all they woke up the next morning daydreaming about.

Having something that all of a sudden threatens to be all-consuming was making me bristle. More than that. Making me physically and emotionally heavy. I’m not against daydreaming or the imagination. What makes me increasingly uneasy is the fact that video games are a ridiculously easy way to lose oneself. To lose time. To lose appetite (he didn’t eat for two days straight aside from the dinners I forced on him). To lose a sense of purpose in reality. To lose natural imagination and creativity. To lose the desire to work toward anything when easy entertainment is readily available.

Our son wants so much for us to give him the freedom to decide when to be on a device. That way he can show us he is responsible, trustworthy, and has restraint. But here’s the deal: it’s way too often that our kids don’t immediately respond when we tell them to do something. Our older son was born with a strong focus on what he wants to do and a desire to negotiate with what I tell him no matter what. It’s been a battle of the wills in that area since he was a toddler. And it’s almost unheard of that our kids do something they know they should do without being reminded. So until they are complying with all the basics around the house without being micromanaged here and there, I see no reason they should have any privilege yet. When there’s enough maturity that the basics are mastered, perhaps that’s when privileges can enter the picture.

Learning vicariously is an important gift life gives. I’ve known of too many kids addicted to media in the past years – kids who wake up all through the night to check the cell phone in bed with them; kids allowed to stay up all night every night to play video games and sleep until the afternoon; kids who stay up routinely until 3 AM during the school year to watch funny YouTube videos. This makes kids addicted to having something there all the time to comfort or entertain; kids severely sleep-deprived; kids who will have major health problems, sleep problems, hormonal problems, mental problems, and energy problems. The body simply can’t work if it lacks sleep. Especially a growing child’s body that will turn into an adult with the same morbid habits. I imagine that kids who need a constant device fix will tire quickly of normal life activities, like being together, going places together, being at events, and being in nature. How can anything or anyone compare to the immediacy of device obsession?

What will the future look like if kids no longer know how to work hard and learn skills? How to do intense physical labor? How to save or wait or persist? I see parents let video games babysit their kids so they can have a nice big break every day from raising and training them, so they are complicit in this kind of training. Parenting is hard work. Video games are a nice out if parents want an out. And too many adults these days are setting the obsessed example in their own social media habits – somehow without even realizing it. Teachers are even doing it, using their phones throughout classroom time. But what will the spiritual nature of future life be like if no one knows how to “be still and know that I am God”? If social media is the go-to in every gap of down time in millions of parents’ lives, and video games and virtual reality fill millions of children’s desires from a young age, how will these next generations all of a sudden value hard work, long-enduring patience, long-term saving, and deep meditation?

My husband and I chatted with a family we love today and asked the parents and their grown sons how they did life when their kids were younger. The sons said they were both really happy that their parents put tight restrictions on device use. The older one said it right away, and the younger one said that because of those restrictions, he never gets bored in real life. He always has creative ideas he wants to do, while his peers didn’t get the restricted chance to build those inner skills. One of the last comments their mom made was something I resonate deeply with. She said that anything – anything – that interferes with the peace of your home should be eliminated.

How our own kids would love to live in a house where anything goes. But I really don’t think they’d like it deep down. Because devices have caused discord between us and our older son, our younger one has suffered for it too. He’s had to listen to all these discussions with his brother, he’s had to miss out on time with us that could be laughter-filled and lighthearted, and he’s had to watch my brow furrow way too many times for his happy-go-lucky spirit.

I’ve felt like getting rid of technology altogether. Many years ago when our older son was little, he got into a phase where he treated his toys and things with more care than he treated his toddler brother. I finally had enough of it. I told him to choose one stuffed animal and one small toy because everything else was going to be put away. I put every single thing that was his into some bags and put them in the garage. For a year. I’m telling you… the moment I came back from the garage, he was a new person. It was the most wonderful, peaceful year. Nothing distracted him from what really mattered. He cherished life, his home, his brother, and us. He cherished nature, he made things, he did fabulous art, and he was delightfully present. Not a forced cherishing; a cherishing that comes from not having constant things vying for his focus.

So this afternoon, we put away his computer and iPod and set a different course for our family life. One that makes our older son mourn. One that makes me soar with inner delight. We are removing the instigators of disharmony and restoring our son to his rightful childhood, unencumbered by the virtual world’s pull.

I think our younger one feels immediately lighter. I prayed in bed tonight that from now on, our family will have laughter, lightness, and joy restored to us. As I was praying, he was saying, “Uh huh, uh huh.” And actually, I think our older son feels safer – he no longer has the dilemma of wanting be on something right in front of him and being denied that privilege most of the time. We did the hard part for him by removing the temptation altogether. He’s freed to being a kid again. Poor guy. I don’t think I’ll ever want to reintroduce it again. Then again, maybe he won’t either deep down.

To think that all of this is something that’s gone on in a house that’s very restricted. I don’t envy the level of difficulty in families where anytime-device-use is permitted. Then again, perhaps it’s easier if there’s no boundary line to maintain and no policing to be done. Or if each family member is so into to his or her own media that no one is involved with each other all that much. Perhaps the ease truly is in all or nothing. No middle ground.

I say all of this if you need to feel that you’re not alone in your challenges. These are the ways I’ve chosen to parent and I nonetheless have plenty of struggles. I was crying this morning and am rejoicing tonight. It feels good to redraw the lines that were slowly getting warped. To declare what we as parents want and do not want for our family’s life. We removed what we thought was a privilege and we’re all four freed from it. Sometimes things have to go off-kilter for you to know how much you’ll fight to right them again.