Ditching the Devices This Summer Before It’s Too Late

Stating the obvious, but things feel a little different these days, don’t they? Different than the 80s. Different than the 90s. I remember I used to think the 90s were so boring, wishing they had a little more personality. Now I would sacrifice a finger or two to get to raise my kids in the 90s. Maybe my left arm.

Remember those good old days? When the biggest war America had lasted a mere 100 hours? When the scariest thing parents had to worry about was their kids watching MTV and stumbling upon a Madonna video? Or (gasp) the I want Your Sex video by George Michael? I was ten when that video came out and I had a TON of questions. I couldn’t process a single thought for weeks after seeing that. School? Forget it. Listening to my parents? Forget it. All I kept thinking about was what was going on under those sheets?

George Michael would probably be considered boring by today’s youth. Not worth pondering at all. Scrolling through an endless cycle of salacious videos on YouTube and TikTok, our kids are being programmed to absorb as much information as possible without having to truly digest anything. They can watch Cardi B’s WAP video and then move on to a video of someone doing magic tricks, as if it’s all part of the same cluster of celluloid drivel. How can that be? If I saw Cardi B’s WAP video when I was ten — hell, if I saw it when I was eighteen — I’m not sure I’d be able to fully function properly as a human being ever again. WAP is terrifying.

Through some advance research, I actually saw the WAP video before my kids. I stay on top of all the weird shit that’s on the internet now, just so I can know what my kids are checking out. I figure if I know what they are seeing and talking about with their friends, then I can maybe help keep things in perspective for them. If I can drop some Cardi B knowledge on them and make light of it, my thought is that I can use that humor to transition the discussion to more serious matters: like making sure they know everything that’s wrong with that video.

But I can’t keep this act up forever. I don’t want to and I don’t have the energy. My concern isn’t really about what’s online either. I know they’re going to see everything one way or another, whether it’s on their device or on some other kid’s at school. No, my problem is the constant barrage of electronic stimulation my kids are being inundated with. Even the thermostat is causing problems. When we lock our kids’ devices up for the night, my son immediately heads to the thermostat to ask Alexa to play songs. I didn’t even know the thermostat came with Alexa, but of course he did. He can’t tell you what he ate today or why he’s only wearing one sock, but he knew the thermostat had Alexa.

What are we doing with all of these devices? Remember the summers you had as a kid? Or coming home after school? How much time you spent alone, ruminating about things? You didn’t see friends every day after school, and if you talked to them, you had to have a real conversation on the phone. Phone calls weren’t “parallel playing” time, where you played hours of mope.io on the iPad while listening to your buddy talk about the guys he just killed. Instead you rode your bike around the block, looking for kids to hang out with and seeing what the neighborhood action was. And if you couldn’t find anybody, you just hung out with your own brain for a little while.

Look, a year of covid certainly pulled at all of our heart strings, and we really felt it for the kids. Society is still treating them like pariahs, making them wear masks at their sports games while vaccinated adults walk mask-free on the sidelines. It’s ridiculous. Kids deserve better than what we’ve done to them this past year. But I don’t want to spout off about things like that right now. This is about the devices; the evil we delivered to our children well before covid even came.

This past year, home and not allowed to see their friends in person, we unchained our kids’ devices. Of course we had to for remote learning, but the kids came up with bulletproof excuses to get more screen time “after school.” When they came to us crying, saying they really missed their friends and wanted to talk to them, it broke our hearts. So we gave them more screen time. When they told us that they wanted to get ahead in class, we told them how proud of them we were for taking the extra initiative and then we gave them more screen time. For a short while we believed every line they threw at us because covid had us scrambling to make sense of everything and we were too exhausted to follow up with formal inquiries. The kids played us like a fiddle, but now their chickens are coming home to roost.

If Apple could ever deliver what it promises and give us a running account of actual device use this past year, I’m certain it would show that for every minute spent doing homework or talking with friends, the kids spent one hundred minutes doing absolute bullcrap. TikTok, Instagram, .io games, you name it. That’s what they were doing. I recognize that there are some school apps that are pretty beneficial from an education point, but these “smart” devices are mostly teaching our kids how to be sneaky procrastinators. Since children are sneaky procrastinators to begin with, I’m not sure why we gave them tools to further aid their drag on society.

So that’s it, the devices are gone. When this school year is over, I’m locking the devices up. The kids will cry me a river for a week, maybe even hate my guts for a month, but I guarantee that a few days after school is over, something remarkable will happen. They will actually be able to hear their own thoughts again and make sense of a world that can only be seen by looking up. And when they tell me that the reason why they want their device is only so that they can talk to their friends, I will direct them to the brand-new landline telephone, which I am ordering right now…