No Devices at the Table
House rules for children of all ages
Leo declared No Devices at the Table when he was five or six, and it was aimed at us, the parents. All he wanted was our attention. This was around 2009, the year his brother Noah was born. I didn’t have a smartphone then, but I spent plenty of time gazing into an iPod touch. I read all three Dragon Tattoo books on that slippery little thing, and it occupied me plenty when there was a baby to be soothed to sleep at 2 a.m.
Today the rule is very much in force, but it’s almost always invoked to forbid children from using Devices at the Table, particularly tablets for watching videos or playing games while having breakfast. An exception is sometimes made for solitary eating. If I wake up first and feed myself breakfast while the others are still asleep, I might read a book or magazine at the table, or I might read the newspaper on a laptop screen, look at email, scroll through tweets of the European morning until I get down to the North American night owls. If one of the kids sits down, I put my Device away because I follow the rule. If the kid sits down first to breakfast and tries for the solitary eating exception, I might let it slide if I’m trying to keep things frictionless, or I might intervene with “No Devices at the Table.” Better to be strategic and make sure two people are being fed at once to avoid the whole issue and its potential to deteriorate into ill temper or even shenanigans.
Naturally, there are more devices in our household than people (two parents, two kids). There are two iPhones, one 11 year-old kid phone, two iPads, an Android tablet, a Kindle, two MacBooks (one is old and rarely used), one Chromebook, one Nintendo 3DS, along with several televisions and a desktop PC. Not all of them make it to the table, but most of them can.
One reason to enforce this rule is to encourage sociability and conversation. Another is to kill the competing, cacophonous audio outputs of two or more videos or games. It drives us crazy that the kids don’t seem to mind when one is watching TV (“on the big TV”) and the other is watching something on YouTube on his lap, and both soundtracks blare from the same living room. This can be solved with headphones, which is even more anti-social. But there might also be an underlying sense of decorum that Devices at the Table violate. Leo didn’t care about this when he was five, but on some level for me it’s about propriety. Disapproving of these things at the table is like disapproving of men in shorts or beer in bottles at a fancy party. We have standards.
The media technology scholar in me is quite sure we invest too much mystical power in these Devices whose uses demand constant, vigilant monitoring. Mobile devices and computers can be employed for such a range of tasks that proscribing them means losing many productive uses. A six year-old might use a tablet mainly for games and videos but I use my phone overwhelmingly to read: Instapapered articles, tweets, Facebook statuses, news stories, email, text messages. We have no rule about books or magazines at the table, and it seems odd to forbid a Device if it’s being used to read a book or magazine when the exact same content would be unregulated in print form. But following the same practices, I also avoid reading while seated at the table with kids. This is a contrast against the breakfast table of my childhood, where my father would read the paper and work on the crossword puzzle (which he still does daily, sometimes on an iPad), and be more or less unavailable for conversation. (Hi Dad.)
It’s hard to imagine banning print media from the table, or for that matter from anywhere. We are so used to the printed word and image, which are present in so many places, that regulating print would be pretty odd. Kids are encouraged to read as much as possible as a matter practically of their good hygiene. But Devices are “screens” and screens, at least in the parenting circles familiar to me, are such seductive threats to our children that we end up internalizing society’s harsh judgment for allowing them even in modest doses. They are like sugary soda, harmful pleasures to be moderated. And meanwhile, the same parents making guilty confessions about how much screen time they grudgingly permit spend most of their days staring at screens.
Our angst over Devices carries on the McLuhanist influence of thinking of the medium as the message, of regarding the Device as the powerful force rather than whatever app or content is running on it. And this is matched with the fears that often accompany newly popular technologies, especially ones with the power to mesmerize children. But our Devices seem no less mesmerizing to adults, and every evening as a No Devices dinner draws to a close, I reach for my phone to check in. The fact that there is always fresh content there gives me more pleasure than the content itself, which as a rule is less interesting than it might have been. It’s good to have pauses in the hour-by-hour, day-by-day rhythm of connection to online communities and attention to the gushing firehose of media, to schedule breaks and variations in activity. Even if Devices aren’t nearly as dominating as we fantasize, we might want to train ourselves for survival without them. Technology comes and goes and life is still very often lonely and boring. Better get used to it, kids.
