Aug 29, 2023·edited Aug 29, 2023Liked by Ruth Gaskovski
I have decided I have two goals for our school year:
1) “waste” more time WITH my children
2) be more easily interrupted (except when I’m taking a nap. We’re really working on NOT interrupting mom’s nap unless there’s an honest to goodness emergency).
I have this sense that my perception of what time is for is being reworked. I feel exceptionally out of sorts because growth is often unpleasant. But I’ve been wondering if technology gives us this illusion of being busy and important, when perhaps it’s mostly an escape from having to pay attention to our real life (insert Wendell Berry quote about the futility of “keeping up with the times” here).
I was also struck by the larger context of The Machine which Paul Kingsnorth has been exploring on his Substack, and the spiritual significance of Mammon which he expands upon in this excellent interview at The Plough:
“[W]hen you worship Mammon, whether that’s the actual worship of a god or a demon or whether it’s the worship of that spirit, you are just accumulating wealth. And that is, again, the spirit of the Tower of Babel. It’s the spirit of Cain. It’s the spirit of the worldly thing that I call the machine, this great technological monster combined with consumer capitalism which is basically ravaging the earth. It’s Mammon. Our entire society is worshiping Mammon. We’ve taken the seven deadly sins and we’ve turned them all into consumer opportunities. Every single one of the seven deadly sins has been monetized and is promoted as a means of economic growth. So it seems to me that we are openly worshiping Mammon.
And the inevitable result of this worship is that we are going to start, and we’re already openly doing it now, trying to create new forms of life, trying to create beings and gods and artificial intelligences, trying to rebuild nature from scratch, trying to make ourselves live forever, upload our minds, all of this kind of increasingly demonic fantasizing that’s going on in Silicon Valley.
It all comes down to the worship of Mammon, I think. The refusal to give away, the desire to accumulate, the desire for power. And it’s the oldest binary I think in Christianity, isn’t it? Those are the two options. You get God or Mammon and you can’t serve both. And that’s why the deeper I go into the Christian journey, the more it seems to me to be almost impossible to live as a Christian in this culture. And I don’t know what that means for me yet, but I have to work it out.”
Aug 29, 2023·edited Aug 29, 2023Liked by Ruth Gaskovski
Thanks so much for this richness, Ruth, as always!
I wanted to add a corollary to your daughter's wise caveat: Postman Pledge-type commitments happen (or should happen) within a wider context of an agreed-on understanding of what a human being is and what are the roles of parents, family, church, etc. Tech limits are never (or should never be!) set within a vacuum, just as limits on eating sweets do not happen in a vacuum. Rather, they take place within the context of raising a child to become an adult—and part of that process is allowing increasing responsibility to the child as he or she grows older.
Indeed, part of wise parenting is recognizing one's own deputed authority and responsibility to raise a self-ruled (in the classical sense) adult. (If a parent were still restricting a teenager on the teenager's choice of whether to eat dessert or not, for instance, that would be clearly concerning!)
What's interesting is that I find that parents who practice tech limits as a family and community tend to have children who grow up into more responsible adults, since if parents are being that intentional, they also tend to understand the broader context of their own responsibilities—and the parent's own limits. If tech limits (or any limits) are merely about control and fear, then they will certainly fail. But if rules are made out of control and fear, then they are almost certainly trespassing the proper bounds of parental (and, for that matter, governmental) authority anyway.
I often return to my dad's example for all of this: He set examples, encouraged good habits, and then apportioned appropriate responsibility to my brothers and me, and never out of a spirit of fear, but rather from a spirit of peace and common sense.
I completely eliminated video games when I was 15 so I could focus on my school exams - and never took them up again. I remember sitting next to someone in Biology and telling him I had eliminated video games and he was shocked and said "I wish I could do that, I am so addicted" (he was going to give me his console at one point to try and break his habit).
One thing I have found helpful in resisting tech is to fill your mind/eyes with what truly satisfies (especially for me that is nature, a good book or prayer). If you are not filling your time with good things the technology addictions come seeping back in like osmosis/diffusion filling a vacuum I have found.
I use a flip phone. It is a great exercise in patience to text lengthy texts, which is fine by me. When my kids entered high school I bought another flip phone, dubbing it the “family phone” to be used by any child who would need to coordinate with me when they needed to be picked up from after school activities. We live in the country so school was many miles from our house. My children could not buy a smart phone until they were out of high school and could pay for it themselves. They were totally fine with that, or at least they never complained to me - I am sure they complained to friends :)
A 2023 study of middle school age children laid out some scary findings. Scientists recruited more than one-hundred and fifty children (aged twelve years) from rural North Carolina public schools. The children were surveyed regarding their social media usage (Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat): some of the kids rarely checked social media (one time or less per day) other kids were glued to their screens (checking social media more than twenty times a day). The researchers performed functional MRIs (an imaging study which can evaluate brain anatomy and activity) on the children every year for three consecutive years. The researchers also asked the children a bunch of psychological questions.
Wow! Thank you for this. I'm the parent that everyone rolls their eyes at when I try to discuss technology, phones and their effects on our kids. I thought that I was one of the only ones. Lots of good things to read here. I wish that this mindset would get further out into the masses. I tell people that Steve Jobs et al didn't let their kids have smartphones or put limits on their usage but are happy to addict ours, which maybe gets a pause. Looking forward to reading more of your pieces.
Dear Mrs G, Thank you for your unifying approach to combat this modern moral dilemma. Invictus!
Busy parents MUST decide whether to 'go with the e-flow babysitter' or recognize that this childcare substitute is "LIT-tra-lee" destroying their kids. Like, uh literally, exactly, pointedly, assuredly.
In one brief instant (between their growth spurts) you'll witness helplessly your precious baby has morphed into a self-harming bobblehead snowflake that you don't know and who doesn't know you!
This is on a crisis magnitude far greater than the potential lightning strike of WuFlu, IMHO.
Gosh, I just stumbled upon your substack this morning, and it is very timely. My husband and I have a young daughter, but we already feel the weight of these decisions in our personal lives and in hers.
I can make excuses for why I should have my phone on me ("What if I miss a picture with my daughter?"), but honestly, those are vastly outweighed by the negatives (I want my daughter to know she is worth my full attention).
I grew up in a family that has traditional values, goes to church, wants to love Jesus and love each other, but, there was never a restriction on screens. I see how this is hurting my nieces and nephews, and I just don't even know how to broach this subject with my parents right now. I want to share this article, but I know their hearts would not be open to it today. Praying for opportunities and open doors here.
For now, I will do my part by setting boundaries and guidelines for how my little family uses technology in our home. Thanks for the insightful (and gracious) post.
I am going to save this post and come back to it for some wisdom as my children get older. They are both under 2, but my wife and I are very concerned with screentime, and specifically with how we use our phones in front of them. Just last week we decided to implement a house rule of “all devices and electronics will be turned off at 6 in the evening and that will be when we read, write, talk, play games or anything really. It will just all be done while we stay disconnected from tech and connected with each other.
I’m also so glad you addressed the video game issue for boys. The problems that start with video games as teenagers definitely carry over into adulthood. I witness it firsthand all the time. So many guys who are 22-40, at least where I am from, have no other hobbies than video games and surprise surprise, they are mostly single or if they are married, their spouses hate the fact that they spend so much time playing video games.
I personally never got that into them. My mom limited our video game time to just 30 minutes a day when I was younger and eventually I realized I would rather go outside and play anyway, or read a book. I believe me not playing them will help my children not become too obsessed with them. But I will always be on the lookout for them and make sure that if they do play them, that they understand that video games can be fun, but should never be so high on your priority list that they interfere with more important things or people.
I love the poem Invictus and can feel the power coming off those two lines but had never considered them in a tech context before- thanks for opening up a new alley of thought!
I find these posts thought-provoking. Thank you for the hard work, and for providing links to other essays and studies. Perhaps you are aware of it but there is a really harrowing story that more children are drowning because of their parents' smartphone use at the beach. I struggle to think of an example of how technology can be more destructive to children than that.
I have two children under 3. The point you make about leading by example, even at a young age, rings true. I think the contribution from your daughter is excellent and gets to the heart of the tension. How do you strike the balance between guiding your children and protecting them from very real harm, with being controlling or even puritanical, provoking perhaps a delayed rebellion? I don't expect an answer, I simply feel this outlines the dilemma.
In general, I am curious from your Christian perspective how you view computer technology? It strikes me that if one believes the universe is the creation of a benevolent God, then computers are something that an intelligent being will eventually invent. I even perceive beauty in the way they function at certain levels, and with particular examples of code. Therefore while I agree that we should abstain from addictive and destructive tendencies that have been built into this technology, I am just as curious as what we should be doing with the technology to make it a healthy aspect of our existence.
I find the apocalyptic strain of writing sometimes acts as a relief for some people from the complexity of our modern situation, unhelpful, even self-indulgent, as it offers people nothing to do. Being constructive - which you are, and is what I like in your writing - is actually intensely more difficult than being critical of what is.
As with all healing, I believe feeding the body with nutritious food like omega 6s from butter and egg yolks, along with bone broth, which helps regulate dopamine (which is destroyed by blue light) is something every parent can do to begin. Seeing the Sun first thing can also help trigger dopamine and natural cortisol release, setting our children up to be tired later in the day.
FYI some science on how EMFs affect the brains of children:
Phones are created to be addictive, bad for the users health and for those around the user. Sounds like cigarettes - could they similarly be banned in public places? The future is unknown, but we must get to the root cause of these societal problems, not paste over them.
It is perhaps interesting to note that all the images featured in this posting are essentially fantasy images straight out of Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post. They had little or no congruence with the harsh realities that most children faced (back when) those images were created. Nor do they have real relevance to the situation in which the overwhelming majority of children live in 2023, especially the millions of under-privileged children that now live in many/most places in America.
I have decided I have two goals for our school year:
1) “waste” more time WITH my children
2) be more easily interrupted (except when I’m taking a nap. We’re really working on NOT interrupting mom’s nap unless there’s an honest to goodness emergency).
I have this sense that my perception of what time is for is being reworked. I feel exceptionally out of sorts because growth is often unpleasant. But I’ve been wondering if technology gives us this illusion of being busy and important, when perhaps it’s mostly an escape from having to pay attention to our real life (insert Wendell Berry quote about the futility of “keeping up with the times” here).
Superb. This morning I just read two essays from young people whose precious lives were being destroyed:
https://open.substack.com/pub/bariweiss/p/why-i-traded-my-smartphone-for-an-ax?r=1pg5cw&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
I was also struck by the larger context of The Machine which Paul Kingsnorth has been exploring on his Substack, and the spiritual significance of Mammon which he expands upon in this excellent interview at The Plough:
“[W]hen you worship Mammon, whether that’s the actual worship of a god or a demon or whether it’s the worship of that spirit, you are just accumulating wealth. And that is, again, the spirit of the Tower of Babel. It’s the spirit of Cain. It’s the spirit of the worldly thing that I call the machine, this great technological monster combined with consumer capitalism which is basically ravaging the earth. It’s Mammon. Our entire society is worshiping Mammon. We’ve taken the seven deadly sins and we’ve turned them all into consumer opportunities. Every single one of the seven deadly sins has been monetized and is promoted as a means of economic growth. So it seems to me that we are openly worshiping Mammon.
And the inevitable result of this worship is that we are going to start, and we’re already openly doing it now, trying to create new forms of life, trying to create beings and gods and artificial intelligences, trying to rebuild nature from scratch, trying to make ourselves live forever, upload our minds, all of this kind of increasingly demonic fantasizing that’s going on in Silicon Valley.
It all comes down to the worship of Mammon, I think. The refusal to give away, the desire to accumulate, the desire for power. And it’s the oldest binary I think in Christianity, isn’t it? Those are the two options. You get God or Mammon and you can’t serve both. And that’s why the deeper I go into the Christian journey, the more it seems to me to be almost impossible to live as a Christian in this culture. And I don’t know what that means for me yet, but I have to work it out.”
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/technology/the-technology-of-demons
Thanks so much for this richness, Ruth, as always!
I wanted to add a corollary to your daughter's wise caveat: Postman Pledge-type commitments happen (or should happen) within a wider context of an agreed-on understanding of what a human being is and what are the roles of parents, family, church, etc. Tech limits are never (or should never be!) set within a vacuum, just as limits on eating sweets do not happen in a vacuum. Rather, they take place within the context of raising a child to become an adult—and part of that process is allowing increasing responsibility to the child as he or she grows older.
Indeed, part of wise parenting is recognizing one's own deputed authority and responsibility to raise a self-ruled (in the classical sense) adult. (If a parent were still restricting a teenager on the teenager's choice of whether to eat dessert or not, for instance, that would be clearly concerning!)
What's interesting is that I find that parents who practice tech limits as a family and community tend to have children who grow up into more responsible adults, since if parents are being that intentional, they also tend to understand the broader context of their own responsibilities—and the parent's own limits. If tech limits (or any limits) are merely about control and fear, then they will certainly fail. But if rules are made out of control and fear, then they are almost certainly trespassing the proper bounds of parental (and, for that matter, governmental) authority anyway.
I often return to my dad's example for all of this: He set examples, encouraged good habits, and then apportioned appropriate responsibility to my brothers and me, and never out of a spirit of fear, but rather from a spirit of peace and common sense.
And if the taste for real things is cultivated from youth (I think often of this piece by Joshua Gibbs on this: https://web.archive.org/web/20220629230149/https://www.circeinstitute.org/blog/wasted-children-keeping-babylon-bay), if the children have been given a feast of good, true, and beautiful things in a home filled with the spirit of charity...my hunch is that that's going to stay with them and bear fruit for many years to come.
Lots of wisdom here Ruth,
I completely eliminated video games when I was 15 so I could focus on my school exams - and never took them up again. I remember sitting next to someone in Biology and telling him I had eliminated video games and he was shocked and said "I wish I could do that, I am so addicted" (he was going to give me his console at one point to try and break his habit).
One thing I have found helpful in resisting tech is to fill your mind/eyes with what truly satisfies (especially for me that is nature, a good book or prayer). If you are not filling your time with good things the technology addictions come seeping back in like osmosis/diffusion filling a vacuum I have found.
I have nothing to add to this wonderful post except to say that Winslow Homer rocks : )
I use a flip phone. It is a great exercise in patience to text lengthy texts, which is fine by me. When my kids entered high school I bought another flip phone, dubbing it the “family phone” to be used by any child who would need to coordinate with me when they needed to be picked up from after school activities. We live in the country so school was many miles from our house. My children could not buy a smart phone until they were out of high school and could pay for it themselves. They were totally fine with that, or at least they never complained to me - I am sure they complained to friends :)
Great post Ruth!
Here's some added context...
A 2023 study of middle school age children laid out some scary findings. Scientists recruited more than one-hundred and fifty children (aged twelve years) from rural North Carolina public schools. The children were surveyed regarding their social media usage (Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat): some of the kids rarely checked social media (one time or less per day) other kids were glued to their screens (checking social media more than twenty times a day). The researchers performed functional MRIs (an imaging study which can evaluate brain anatomy and activity) on the children every year for three consecutive years. The researchers also asked the children a bunch of psychological questions.
https://brain2mind.substack.com/p/a-new-study-confirms-social-media
Wow! Thank you for this. I'm the parent that everyone rolls their eyes at when I try to discuss technology, phones and their effects on our kids. I thought that I was one of the only ones. Lots of good things to read here. I wish that this mindset would get further out into the masses. I tell people that Steve Jobs et al didn't let their kids have smartphones or put limits on their usage but are happy to addict ours, which maybe gets a pause. Looking forward to reading more of your pieces.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-execs-screen-time-children-bill-gates-steve-jobs-2019-9
Dear Mrs G, Thank you for your unifying approach to combat this modern moral dilemma. Invictus!
Busy parents MUST decide whether to 'go with the e-flow babysitter' or recognize that this childcare substitute is "LIT-tra-lee" destroying their kids. Like, uh literally, exactly, pointedly, assuredly.
In one brief instant (between their growth spurts) you'll witness helplessly your precious baby has morphed into a self-harming bobblehead snowflake that you don't know and who doesn't know you!
This is on a crisis magnitude far greater than the potential lightning strike of WuFlu, IMHO.
I do plan on getting the Mr.'s sci-fi novel soon.
With gratitude.
Gosh, I just stumbled upon your substack this morning, and it is very timely. My husband and I have a young daughter, but we already feel the weight of these decisions in our personal lives and in hers.
I can make excuses for why I should have my phone on me ("What if I miss a picture with my daughter?"), but honestly, those are vastly outweighed by the negatives (I want my daughter to know she is worth my full attention).
I grew up in a family that has traditional values, goes to church, wants to love Jesus and love each other, but, there was never a restriction on screens. I see how this is hurting my nieces and nephews, and I just don't even know how to broach this subject with my parents right now. I want to share this article, but I know their hearts would not be open to it today. Praying for opportunities and open doors here.
For now, I will do my part by setting boundaries and guidelines for how my little family uses technology in our home. Thanks for the insightful (and gracious) post.
I am going to save this post and come back to it for some wisdom as my children get older. They are both under 2, but my wife and I are very concerned with screentime, and specifically with how we use our phones in front of them. Just last week we decided to implement a house rule of “all devices and electronics will be turned off at 6 in the evening and that will be when we read, write, talk, play games or anything really. It will just all be done while we stay disconnected from tech and connected with each other.
I’m also so glad you addressed the video game issue for boys. The problems that start with video games as teenagers definitely carry over into adulthood. I witness it firsthand all the time. So many guys who are 22-40, at least where I am from, have no other hobbies than video games and surprise surprise, they are mostly single or if they are married, their spouses hate the fact that they spend so much time playing video games.
I personally never got that into them. My mom limited our video game time to just 30 minutes a day when I was younger and eventually I realized I would rather go outside and play anyway, or read a book. I believe me not playing them will help my children not become too obsessed with them. But I will always be on the lookout for them and make sure that if they do play them, that they understand that video games can be fun, but should never be so high on your priority list that they interfere with more important things or people.
Such a great post, Ruth! Thanks for all you do!
Great post Ruth.
I love the poem Invictus and can feel the power coming off those two lines but had never considered them in a tech context before- thanks for opening up a new alley of thought!
I find these posts thought-provoking. Thank you for the hard work, and for providing links to other essays and studies. Perhaps you are aware of it but there is a really harrowing story that more children are drowning because of their parents' smartphone use at the beach. I struggle to think of an example of how technology can be more destructive to children than that.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/aug/15/parents-fixated-by-phones-linked-to-child-drownings-in-germany
I have two children under 3. The point you make about leading by example, even at a young age, rings true. I think the contribution from your daughter is excellent and gets to the heart of the tension. How do you strike the balance between guiding your children and protecting them from very real harm, with being controlling or even puritanical, provoking perhaps a delayed rebellion? I don't expect an answer, I simply feel this outlines the dilemma.
In general, I am curious from your Christian perspective how you view computer technology? It strikes me that if one believes the universe is the creation of a benevolent God, then computers are something that an intelligent being will eventually invent. I even perceive beauty in the way they function at certain levels, and with particular examples of code. Therefore while I agree that we should abstain from addictive and destructive tendencies that have been built into this technology, I am just as curious as what we should be doing with the technology to make it a healthy aspect of our existence.
I find the apocalyptic strain of writing sometimes acts as a relief for some people from the complexity of our modern situation, unhelpful, even self-indulgent, as it offers people nothing to do. Being constructive - which you are, and is what I like in your writing - is actually intensely more difficult than being critical of what is.
As with all healing, I believe feeding the body with nutritious food like omega 6s from butter and egg yolks, along with bone broth, which helps regulate dopamine (which is destroyed by blue light) is something every parent can do to begin. Seeing the Sun first thing can also help trigger dopamine and natural cortisol release, setting our children up to be tired later in the day.
FYI some science on how EMFs affect the brains of children:
https://romanshapoval.substack.com/p/how-does-emf-affect-children
Thank you for your work Ruth! It's very timely with the research I've been doing as well.
Phones are created to be addictive, bad for the users health and for those around the user. Sounds like cigarettes - could they similarly be banned in public places? The future is unknown, but we must get to the root cause of these societal problems, not paste over them.
It is perhaps interesting to note that all the images featured in this posting are essentially fantasy images straight out of Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post. They had little or no congruence with the harsh realities that most children faced (back when) those images were created. Nor do they have real relevance to the situation in which the overwhelming majority of children live in 2023, especially the millions of under-privileged children that now live in many/most places in America.