Sometimes finding a reason to get my teens off their screens isn’t easy – especially with summer holidays in full swing and schedules thrown out the window. How do you explain why the screen shouldn’t be their ‘go-to’ every time they find a spare nano-second? I think I stumble here because it’s not the way I grew up – or the way any of us parenting today grew up. It’s new territory, and besides a gut feeling telling me that being outside on a sunny summer day is generally better than a day vegetating on the couch deep within their private screen-worlds, where’s my proof?
Being the first generation to parent in this device-heavy world – to come up with rules to help navigate these unchartered waters – is a challenge. And re-cycling the oft-used excuses my parents gave me, doesn’t work. Because when I was my children’s ages of 13 and 15, I didn’t have a cell phone for my mom to consider - or a portfolio of online accounts where I curated my life in photos, or games I played online, or YouTube videos I turned to for laughs, lessons and inspiration. I didn’t take Selfies for Instagram or Snapchat or use a hashtag as a prefix for my thoughts, or worry about the number of Likes I had on something I posted somewhere, anywhere (because not posting means it didn’t happen, right?).
The fact that I’m not a social media expert, and that there isn’t a tried and trusted manual on how to govern teens and screens, diminishes my authority. In search of how to bolster it, I read psychologist Dr. Leonard Sax’s recent book, The Collapse of Parenting (Basic Books, December 2015), where he describes today’s culture as one in which same-age peers matter more than parents, and how this loss – where friends win primacy over family – has profound negative effects. Enter social media and its intimate relationship with our kids, and one can see how parental authority risks being further reduced. Sax likens social media to cotton candy and reminds us that “Part of the task of the parent is, and always has been, educating desire: teaching your child to desire and enjoy things that are higher and better than cotton candy.”
Then I watched a YouTube video of a mother from Georgia attempting to regain her parental authority by shooting her children’s cell phones with a gun, and ironically garnering internet fame declaring: “I hereby denounce the effects social media have on my children…. I take back my role as your parent.” I certainly don’t share her extreme methods - but I do understand the powerlessness a parent can feel when pitted against a little smartphone.
The world of social media may be new to me, but what I do know for sure is that the culture I enjoyed during my childhood summer holidays kept me happy, kept our family tight, kept respect in check and pressures at bay. So I tell my kids about what’s to gain by spending more time off their screens than on. And I say it with authority. I tell them about that faraway time, pre-devices - about the family drives up to our camp, when I read Archie comics while we all listened to the same music from one shared source, not an ear bud in sight, and talked and shared jokes that didn’t require a screen. I tell them about how, when I arrived, I dove into the woods, or into the lake, into my own quiet, unpressured, unplugged world – where I was completely alone with my thoughts, not compelled to share anything with anyone except the wind and the waves. I tell them about the “Bug Club”, the summer club I invented à la Judy Blume with my one best friend (there was no need to have the now requisite 1000-minimum friends); about the skits and dances my sister and I performed, not to post on YouTube for a shot at fame, but in the living room just for our parents. Because their applause was enough.
For better or worse, my kids may never experience chats in grocery store line ups, words exchanged at bus stops, in elevators, on dog walks, at playgrounds, at dinners with friends and even some family – because phones are accepted as their constant companions. My kids will never know a world without instant answers, infinite friends, and relentless Pings that dangle the irresistible temptation of someone or something better than who they’re with in real time. A world where being together with one friend truly means just the two of you – no eyes darting to check texts or calls - ‘The grass is always greener’-syndrome, gone viral, and good manners, a thing of the past. This “erosion of basic civility” – is described by Daniel Mendelsohn in his article “Lessons in Civility” in August’s Town & Country as: “… a gross failure of attentiveness to the person you are actually with in a public space, to their sensitivities…or, worse, to their very presence – their existence.”
When they invariably start itching to return to their screen-lives, I’ll encourage my kids to try playing this summer the way I was encultured to do – with bikes and balls, and live (not online) friends in my backyard, running down lanes, shooting hoops – all done screen-free. Childhood has evolved to include concepts my parents never had to consider. I acknowledge I’m a pioneer in this new parenting frontier. I’m aiming to maintain my authority not with a gun, but with balance and respect and with my own brand of summer that I hope might attract them as much as any Ping, and possibly help slow the carefreeness I notice is draining from childhood like a cell phone battery: fast and irrecoverable without the right charge.