Raising Un-plugged Children
January 6, 2015
ANNE writes:
Regarding your post “Education-by-Gadget:”
I have a nine-year-old, a five-year-old and a two-year-old. All girls. And a baby due any moment.
We do not own a television or subscribe to cable although we own two laptops, a desktop, one tablet, one smartphone, one “old school” cell phone, and a house phone. My husband and I used to enjoy watching sports, particularly college basketball, but gave it up.
My children do not “play on the computer.” They do not play with the tablet or the phone except in dire emergencies, which happens two or three times a year. Occasionally they watch a movie on the laptop, but usually, we watch a family film together projected on the wall from the laptop. This happens maybe once a month.
They are allowed to look at archived family photos on the desktop, but nothing else.
After nine years of parenting, this is where we’re at with gadget control because every time we have allowed it to go further than this, we pay for it over and over again. But when my husband and I hold strong and insist they find alternate methods of entertaining themselves no matter the situation, everyone is rewarded. My children never get in the car without a doll and a minimum of three books. Even the two-year-old. And in the three years that we’ve owned our minivan, we’ve put over 70,000 miles on it. These children know how to do long road trips without the latest gadgetry. They have each other after all.
In my opinion the greatest and cheapest babysitters are good friends and relatives who have a relationship with the children and are willing to spend some time with them for the benefit of all involved. It has been years since I’ve paid a babysitter because we don’t need one that often and because there are adults in our lives who actually want to spend time with my children.
I am not bragging. I just know that previous generations raised their children with far less resources, and with far better results. Electronics of all types are a disaster for the brain formation of our children, but more importantly they do nothing to help them develop their virtues and their character. Nothing makes my children squabble like an electronic device to control. Nothing motivates their desire to work together and entertain each other like a long car ride where there are no electronics available. And it just helps that their parent, the non-driver, also has his or her nose in a book. We have 14 bookcases in our tiny house and more books in our storage shed out back. Everyone is always reading a book or two or three.
I love being the only family at a restaurant where no one is in front of a screen.
But it takes work. Self-discipline. Self-control. A conscious effort to not check my phone, to stay off the computer, to pick up a book, to start a project, and a constant effort to mitigate my own “electronic addiction”.
My middle child’s godparents are 22 and 20. The godmother is a recent college graduate with honors; she is currently doing a year of service with a community of traditional sisters discerning what God has in store for her life. The godfather is at junior college, saving money, and getting ready to transfer to a prestigious program in engineering. He too is discerning God’s will for his life. He does not have a smart phone, does not text and cannot be readily reached by email or phone. They were both raised in one of the richest suburbs in the country and have 4 younger siblings at home. They are incredibly well-read and very interesting to talk to about a variety of topics. They love their Catholic faith and live it well. It can be done. And they inspire me to raise my children to be like them, maybe even to be better.
— Comments —
Sven writes:
There was a slim book published in 1999 entitled “High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don’t Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian” by Clifford Stoll. Mr. Stoll is a legendary pioneer of the cyber world, responsible for catching hacker Marcus Hess, so it is interesting that he argues that children have little need to use computers, despite the arguments that they will “be left behind in an increasingly technology driven world.” One of his points is that modern computer interfaces are designed to be as user friendly as possible, so training children to use them is completely unnecessary. As a man who was homeschooled, I can confirm this. Although my teenage interactions with computers was limited to learning typing, college (one of the US service academies) saw me easily learning the skills needed for classes that required computer data analysis and word processing. Mastering radars and other high tech weapons and navigation systems presented few problems either, despite my being basically “computer illiterate” before college.
The point is that Anne’s children aren’t missing out on anything educationally, despite what some would say. I do believe high school aged young adults learning spreadsheets, word processing, and typing are very helpful, but that does not justifies massive amounts of unsupervised time surfing the internet or playing games. It is refreshing to hear about someone raising their children without using TV, internet, and video games as a babysitter. Only good will come of it.
Laura writes:
While minimal exposure is probably harmless, there’s no need for children to be on computers. Electronic imagery deadens the imagination.
Karl D. writes:
Kudos to Anne. I sincerely hope she can keep it going as her children reach adolescence. Chances are good though since gadgets have not been an integral part of their daily lives. It never ceases to amaze me how people no longer seem to be able to just be in their own thoughts anymore. They must have constant outside stimuli. Whenever I am on public transport, or in a cafe, I notice that the moment people’s rear ends hit the seat, out come the smartphones with heads all looking downwards. Completely oblivious to the world around them. They are either texting each other inane nonsense or photographing their food to post on Facebook. Young girls seem to be the worst offenders. It made me wonder how anyone makes friends with one another or meets members of the opposite sex anymore? Some of the best people I ever met has been from striking up conversations as strangers. Not to mention meeting girls. Its very hard to talk to someone when their face is buried in a smartphone or they have headphones on.
Laura writes:
Social media are anti-social.
Mike writes:
I have several comments on raising un-plugged children. The first is that I’m part of the first generation with the possibility of easy access to computers. I count myself quite fortunate to have had access to computers from when I was of grade-school age in the early 1980’s. I learned to program when I was eight, continued through high school and college, and have now turned it into my career. Even 30 years later, I can point to lessons I learned back in that grade school classroom that have direct benefit even now both professionally and personally. My history with the technology therefore makes it difficult to embrace the idea of shunning it entirely, even for children at a young age.
For me, something that helped was the fact that my youthful explorations were guided and supported by interested parents. Because of them, I spent less time playing video games and more time learning how to write them. Shunning the technology entirely would have meant losing this opportunity, which would have been a shame.
I also wonder at Karl D.’s comment that “they are either texting each other inane nonsense or photographing their food to post on Facebook. ” Maybe that’s common, but it’s certainly not for sure (ie: my last text was to coordinate with my wife and the last thing I read on my phone was a history of Flourine chemistry.) I therefore believe it to be highly unlikely that Karl D.’s statement is fully accurate.
Laura writes:
Anne described a good model. Computers are not shunned entirely but their use is severely restricted, especially for children under ten.
You say you gained valuable lessons from early childhood, but I question whether all of those lessons couldn’t have been learned from high school onward. In any event, it is very possible to raise and educate computer programmers without exposing children to much computer use in early childhood. My mother, who is now in her eighties, spent her free time playing cards and reading as a child. That did not keep her from becoming one of the early computer programmers in this country and to this day she is very competent on computers. Obviously the inventors of computers and the earliest computer programmers had no exposure in childhood.
Exposing most children to heavy or unlimited electronic usage in the hopes of encouraging a minority of future computer programmers is not, in my opinion, worth the price, which is many children who are restless, easily distracted, easily bored and habituated to the stimulation of electronic games. Computers should not be in elementary education at all. That is not to say that people who use computers for educating their young children at home are damaging them. The problem is that schools tend to over-use them, precisely because they pacify the students.
Regarding Karl’s statement, I don’t think he was condemning texting itself. He was condemning over-use of phones for texting.
Mike responds:
It probably won’t come as a surprise to think that I do believe it was useful to be exposed to the concepts of computer programming at a relatively young age prior to high school. Programming can be easily accessible to grade school students, and provides a good on ramp to useful formal reasoning skills. Decomposing a task into a sequence of actions, formally specifying those actions, and then maintaining the persistence to make the something actually operate are skills that are equally useful to grade school students as they are high school students.
Done properly, even very young programmers are capable of writing programs that contain named abstractions. This introduces a linguistic element to programming that matches well with young children’s relative speed at learning languages. Viewed in the context of language development, older high school children might well be at a comparative disadvantage to their grade school counterparts. (Anecdotally speaking, this is one area of software development where I find that people tend to struggle.)
Regarding the earliest inventors of computers lacking access, that’s obvious. What’s less obvious to me is that we should cause future generations to walk the same kind of path as those pioneers. I’ll also point out that many of the pioneers of the personal computer revolution back in the 70’s and 80’s did have access from a very young age, although it was a struggle to get that access.
Regarding Karl’s statement, my read was that he was making inferences about the activities of other people he saw using phones, etc.
Laura writes:
Again, while I don’t believe computer use is necessary for younger children, I also don’t think that entirely “shunning” computers is necessary. The strict, limited use advocated by Anne is, in my opinion, best for children before they are high school age.
I agree programming itself can be a valuable thing for a student who is interested in it. The number of those in this category is small, but parents can identify them and give them opportunities to work on programming. That’s entirely different from the kind of use Anne is trying to prevent. Programming involves disciplined mental effort.
A reader writes:
This school needs support and has done wonders with our son.
Here’s a video.
Mrs. Suzanne Thiry writes:
My husband and I have also tried to limit our children’s screen time and thought were doing a good job until our eldest daughter recently needed to have an X-ray after a sports injury. The doctor pointed out that she has the beginning of what he said is becoming so common that they have a name for it: “Student’s Neck” or “Texter’s Neck”. This is a condition increasingly found in teenagers in which the normal curve of the spine in their necks is reduced and straightens over time because they spend so much time looking down at tablets, laptops, iPods, and smart phones while their bones are still growing and forming.
Our daughters have complained in the past about being “the only kids” whose parents impose restrictions on their gadget time, but it’s about to get even more restricted around here.
Sophia writes:
I’m a bit confused by Mrs. Suzanne Thiry’s comment about how the spine at the neck is increasingly distorted from its natural position due to the use of electronics. While that is entirely true and while I completely support more restriction of their use, her/her doctor’s description of it (going from curved to straightened) does not sound correct. Most texters undoubtedly do not hold their heads correctly, as poor posture is widespread in modern Western society, but if their necks are being straightened as they keep their chins down, that’s a good thing! Holding the chin up strains the neck (I always notice now how Christ “raised his eyes to heaven” rather than His head); our problem looking down is more likely compressing rather than lengthening the spine. In its perfection the spine would be straight, though minimal curvature in the upper back is still considered healthy. Images of what this looks like in ancient statues, individuals from non-industrialized cultures, etc., can be observed at Esther Gokhale’s website here. Most chiropractors are seriously misguided. Gokhale’s work is really excellent.
Sophia adds:
I would alter that by saying our problem while looking down is not only the compressing but also slouching the upper body.
