I start to sound like a maniac out in the public because I try to spread this idea to every parent I talk to and I constantly get the same excuses about why they gave into dolling out cell phones to their children.
Granted, my son is only 12 now but in middle-school, he estimates that 90% of his classmates have cell phones, and on any break, are head-down into a video game like Brawlstars or some other flashy mind-numbing addictive attraction. He says he thinks all of the girls have them and are constantly on social apps (don't get me started about that).
However, he impresses me so much with his resistance to this trend. He personally petitioned the school and started a Rubix Cubing club, he plays D&D or Chess on his breaks, and even tries to encourage his friends to put down the phones and join in.
This fight was not intuitive because you need to be very aware that it's a problem... and we all got suckered into it ourselves when this novel technology caught our eye. Modelling is key and through a lot of conscious self-discipline and many talks with like-minded families like Peco's, I feel like the process is having very positive effects on our family as a whole, not just the children.
Again, I would like to thank you, Peco and Ruth, for your hard work on this topic. It is a life-saving endeavor.
Thanks for sharing your son's experience Chad! Kids like him are urgently needed default shifters - so glad to hear that he is motivated to swim against the stream. And kudos to you for leading the way and supporting him :)
I've come to appreciate the phrase 'the language of the forest', as a way of describing a comprehensive sense of how a natural ecosystem (around here, it's mostly woods) works that comes with sustained contact. I learned the language of the forest for Northern New England though intense effort across a decade of my early adult life. My kids, thanks be to God, are learning it as a native tongue. I'm thrilled when I see our four year old teaching the two year old about which plants are good for medicine, or which tree species are better for carving, as she's already developed pattern recognition for dozens of species. She'll never remember not knowing this. Unfortunately, we don't have proficiency in any other spoken languages in our home, but we can give our children immersion in the 'language of the forest' during the window of early language acquisition...
"Engaging with physical reality around them, allowed our children to grow up as active creators, rather than passive consumers expecting to be entertained." Love this!
Creating should really be at the core of what we do, and it comes so naturally once we shift expectations from being entertained to asking "why am I here?"
What a wise insight, to compare that window of opportunity for language learning to the window of opportunity for learning to engage with reality. I’ve never thought of it like that before, but Denise Trull’s recent post about not recognising this world anymore made me think again about how glad I am to have had a childhood free of mobile and smart phones or personal devices of any kind. It’s so radically different to have spent my formative years free of these siren songs, compared to the generation who only experienced tech individually from a young age.
Here is another analogy that I had noted down a few years ago in prepartion for a radio interview that you might find interesting:
"When I talked with my children about the reasons for reading challenging classic novels instead of goofball readers, engaging in long conversations instead of texting, taking long extended walks instead of playing video games, we find at the heart of it the question of what it means to be human: to find meaning beyond ourselves, to recognize our place in history, and to be in relationship with others.
I use the analogy of a beautiful, mountainous, and mysterious landscape. At their age, my children have the opportunity to build train tracks to the farthest reaches of this wondrous scenery (by developing their deep attention). If they build these connections now (i.e., by immersing themselves in classical literature, history, the art of conversation, etc.), they will forever be able to travel to the most remote locations that few others reach. If, however, they were to neglect the laying of these tracks now (and fall for the easy lure of hyper attention), the wonders of this landscape would remain largely hidden from them in their adult lives; only glimpses might be caught when flying over to another far-away land."
Siren song, indeed... and while Ulysses had his crew to lash him to the mast so as not to go mad, our young consumers jump willingly and naively onto the wave-crashing rocks of the tech sirens!
We didn't allow our kids to have phones until they were in high school. Even then I was reluctant and we got them the dumbest phone possible. I do wish that we had paid more attention to the TV time though. I don't watch much TV at all but we always had it in the house and so the kids had more screen time than I would have preferred.
My favorite part of this essay is your photo of the people reading on the plane. I think that people still long for the analog way of life. They have simply been trained to default to the easiest form of input. But if we as a society can remove some of those inputs or make them harder to access then I believe people will want to engage again.
Much of this is on my mind having just finished Peco's book. It is easy to see that the multiplication of technology among the masses has had a dumbing down or numbing effect. The more people "connected" to a device, the easier they are to control.
Yes, while "easy" is our default, we experience much deeper joy and aliveness when we have to "work". Unfortunatley the easy also results in the "dumbing down or numbing effect", and it takes a lot of deliberate effort to shift this default. Thanks for sharing your thoughts Matthew :)
Thank you for this wonderful piece, though I must admit my heart sank a little reading this just as I was getting ready to post my own article which treads on similar ground though much less effectively.
I love how your children are such examples in this space and getting a glimpse of how they navigate this space in what, let's face it, is a technology-dominant world, gives me hope (especially the vignettes in the footnotes).
My own focus is to see how we can motivate children to read more, especially in families where the parents *don't* model good habits, or as you mention, demonstrate hypocrisy that the kids can smell 'keener than freshly baked cookies'.
Thanks for your kind words Graham, and your excellent piece! Glad you published it and I promptly added it to the "further reading" section :) Glad that you found hope in our reflections; I find that letting others witness practical examples of how one *can* live differently (although we are certainly not perfect at it) is essential in supporting a default shift.
I really enjoyed reading your piece as it captured the feel of the early computer era I remember so well. You'll laugh, but my father actually opened one of the first computer stores in Switzerland after being a male nurse for fifteen years and taking only a single computer course at a community centre. My brother took over the store after he passed away and it is still running, 39 years later! Now my brother is the "wise old sage" fixing computers (he even still makes house calls to seniors). I think even though my father saw the tremendous potential of technology, he would most definitely side with both of us on ensuring that children have a firm grounding in reality.
I could not be more grateful that my childhood resembled in many ways that which you have curated for your children. In part that was just by virtue of being born before tablets and smartphones existed. But my parents were committed to getting my sibling and I out into nature, moving our bodies, reading, and engaging in creative acts. We also lived in a variety of environments - a tiny gulf island with no plumbing or electricity (save a little from the generator now and again), a small mining town in the Rocky mountains, and a seaside government town. Each had its own landscapes, culture, and social network. I know my parents struggled in many ways and the moves were stressful for them. But I deeply value the range of experiences I had all before entering high school.
My Latin teacher in 7th grade, Mrs Levitt, required all of us incorrigibles to fill the huge blackboard wall with various phrases in Latin and decorated motif in ancient style, but no spaces larger than a denarii. Fun. To a point. A Horror Vacui demonstration i have borne for 50+years!
Ruth, I never really pondered the horror vacui visual aspect as related to all the other senses, but Eureka! Those tech devices are a big completely capturing sensory mess. Just watching a person oblivious to the world with a device in front of them proves that aspect of tech.
http://ttfuture.org has been describing this situation beginning with his 1977 book Magical Child in which he used the phrase our "monstrous misunderstanding" of what we do to our children, all justified as being For Their Own Good which is the title of a book by Alice Miller.
Is anybody old enough to remember when the (1974) book Birth Without Violence by Frederick LeBoyer was published. At the time it was widely believed that new born babies did not feel anything. So too with the yet-to-be-born baby in the womb.
I start to sound like a maniac out in the public because I try to spread this idea to every parent I talk to and I constantly get the same excuses about why they gave into dolling out cell phones to their children.
Granted, my son is only 12 now but in middle-school, he estimates that 90% of his classmates have cell phones, and on any break, are head-down into a video game like Brawlstars or some other flashy mind-numbing addictive attraction. He says he thinks all of the girls have them and are constantly on social apps (don't get me started about that).
However, he impresses me so much with his resistance to this trend. He personally petitioned the school and started a Rubix Cubing club, he plays D&D or Chess on his breaks, and even tries to encourage his friends to put down the phones and join in.
This fight was not intuitive because you need to be very aware that it's a problem... and we all got suckered into it ourselves when this novel technology caught our eye. Modelling is key and through a lot of conscious self-discipline and many talks with like-minded families like Peco's, I feel like the process is having very positive effects on our family as a whole, not just the children.
Again, I would like to thank you, Peco and Ruth, for your hard work on this topic. It is a life-saving endeavor.
Thanks for sharing your son's experience Chad! Kids like him are urgently needed default shifters - so glad to hear that he is motivated to swim against the stream. And kudos to you for leading the way and supporting him :)
Yes to all of this!
I've come to appreciate the phrase 'the language of the forest', as a way of describing a comprehensive sense of how a natural ecosystem (around here, it's mostly woods) works that comes with sustained contact. I learned the language of the forest for Northern New England though intense effort across a decade of my early adult life. My kids, thanks be to God, are learning it as a native tongue. I'm thrilled when I see our four year old teaching the two year old about which plants are good for medicine, or which tree species are better for carving, as she's already developed pattern recognition for dozens of species. She'll never remember not knowing this. Unfortunately, we don't have proficiency in any other spoken languages in our home, but we can give our children immersion in the 'language of the forest' during the window of early language acquisition...
'the language of the forest'
Beautifully said, Mark!
"Engaging with physical reality around them, allowed our children to grow up as active creators, rather than passive consumers expecting to be entertained." Love this!
Creating should really be at the core of what we do, and it comes so naturally once we shift expectations from being entertained to asking "why am I here?"
What a wise insight, to compare that window of opportunity for language learning to the window of opportunity for learning to engage with reality. I’ve never thought of it like that before, but Denise Trull’s recent post about not recognising this world anymore made me think again about how glad I am to have had a childhood free of mobile and smart phones or personal devices of any kind. It’s so radically different to have spent my formative years free of these siren songs, compared to the generation who only experienced tech individually from a young age.
Here is another analogy that I had noted down a few years ago in prepartion for a radio interview that you might find interesting:
"When I talked with my children about the reasons for reading challenging classic novels instead of goofball readers, engaging in long conversations instead of texting, taking long extended walks instead of playing video games, we find at the heart of it the question of what it means to be human: to find meaning beyond ourselves, to recognize our place in history, and to be in relationship with others.
I use the analogy of a beautiful, mountainous, and mysterious landscape. At their age, my children have the opportunity to build train tracks to the farthest reaches of this wondrous scenery (by developing their deep attention). If they build these connections now (i.e., by immersing themselves in classical literature, history, the art of conversation, etc.), they will forever be able to travel to the most remote locations that few others reach. If, however, they were to neglect the laying of these tracks now (and fall for the easy lure of hyper attention), the wonders of this landscape would remain largely hidden from them in their adult lives; only glimpses might be caught when flying over to another far-away land."
This is great! I hope it will make it into the book that will surely be the fruit of all these reflections:)
…we shall see :)
Majesty of reason! I applaud your message!!
Yes, my gratitude is the same!
Siren song, indeed... and while Ulysses had his crew to lash him to the mast so as not to go mad, our young consumers jump willingly and naively onto the wave-crashing rocks of the tech sirens!
We didn't allow our kids to have phones until they were in high school. Even then I was reluctant and we got them the dumbest phone possible. I do wish that we had paid more attention to the TV time though. I don't watch much TV at all but we always had it in the house and so the kids had more screen time than I would have preferred.
My favorite part of this essay is your photo of the people reading on the plane. I think that people still long for the analog way of life. They have simply been trained to default to the easiest form of input. But if we as a society can remove some of those inputs or make them harder to access then I believe people will want to engage again.
Much of this is on my mind having just finished Peco's book. It is easy to see that the multiplication of technology among the masses has had a dumbing down or numbing effect. The more people "connected" to a device, the easier they are to control.
Yes, while "easy" is our default, we experience much deeper joy and aliveness when we have to "work". Unfortunatley the easy also results in the "dumbing down or numbing effect", and it takes a lot of deliberate effort to shift this default. Thanks for sharing your thoughts Matthew :)
Thank you for this wonderful piece, though I must admit my heart sank a little reading this just as I was getting ready to post my own article which treads on similar ground though much less effectively.
I love how your children are such examples in this space and getting a glimpse of how they navigate this space in what, let's face it, is a technology-dominant world, gives me hope (especially the vignettes in the footnotes).
My own focus is to see how we can motivate children to read more, especially in families where the parents *don't* model good habits, or as you mention, demonstrate hypocrisy that the kids can smell 'keener than freshly baked cookies'.
Here's my take, if you're interested: https://open.substack.com/pub/storygram/p/why-the-humanities-are-essential-digital-literacy
Thanks for your kind words Graham, and your excellent piece! Glad you published it and I promptly added it to the "further reading" section :) Glad that you found hope in our reflections; I find that letting others witness practical examples of how one *can* live differently (although we are certainly not perfect at it) is essential in supporting a default shift.
I really enjoyed reading your piece as it captured the feel of the early computer era I remember so well. You'll laugh, but my father actually opened one of the first computer stores in Switzerland after being a male nurse for fifteen years and taking only a single computer course at a community centre. My brother took over the store after he passed away and it is still running, 39 years later! Now my brother is the "wise old sage" fixing computers (he even still makes house calls to seniors). I think even though my father saw the tremendous potential of technology, he would most definitely side with both of us on ensuring that children have a firm grounding in reality.
Thanks again :)
I checked out Erin Loechner’s The Opt-Out Family from our local library after your interview with her and it is definitely worth the read! 🙂
Agreed! It's as practical as it is inspiring!
I could not be more grateful that my childhood resembled in many ways that which you have curated for your children. In part that was just by virtue of being born before tablets and smartphones existed. But my parents were committed to getting my sibling and I out into nature, moving our bodies, reading, and engaging in creative acts. We also lived in a variety of environments - a tiny gulf island with no plumbing or electricity (save a little from the generator now and again), a small mining town in the Rocky mountains, and a seaside government town. Each had its own landscapes, culture, and social network. I know my parents struggled in many ways and the moves were stressful for them. But I deeply value the range of experiences I had all before entering high school.
My Latin teacher in 7th grade, Mrs Levitt, required all of us incorrigibles to fill the huge blackboard wall with various phrases in Latin and decorated motif in ancient style, but no spaces larger than a denarii. Fun. To a point. A Horror Vacui demonstration i have borne for 50+years!
Fu Puella!!
Ah, Latin! I studied only a smidgen. Amo, amas, amat!
Amamus, amatis, amant!
Thanks for another great post.
This demonstration certainly hit the mark!
Less is more, learned through art appreciation.
Ruth, I never really pondered the horror vacui visual aspect as related to all the other senses, but Eureka! Those tech devices are a big completely capturing sensory mess. Just watching a person oblivious to the world with a device in front of them proves that aspect of tech.
The author featured on this website
http://ttfuture.org has been describing this situation beginning with his 1977 book Magical Child in which he used the phrase our "monstrous misunderstanding" of what we do to our children, all justified as being For Their Own Good which is the title of a book by Alice Miller.
http://www.alice-miller.com/en
All of the other writers featured on the above website have been writing about this very important topic too including these two;
http://www.wombecology.com Michael Odent
http://violence.de/index.html features the work of James Prescott
Is anybody old enough to remember when the (1974) book Birth Without Violence by Frederick LeBoyer was published. At the time it was widely believed that new born babies did not feel anything. So too with the yet-to-be-born baby in the womb.
How horrifyingly wrong they were back then.