This week, we are featuring a guest voice from the field of family technology and research, Assistant Professor Radhika Garg (iSchool, Syracuse University). If you are interested in contributing your insights on families and tech during COVID-19 to the blog, please email Rebecca: rem23@uw.edu.
Technology Non-Use as a Mechanism to Build Family Resilience
Tina is a single mother of two — a six-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl. She lives in a suburban area of San Jose, California. She is the founder and owner of a company that sells hand-crafted jewelry, and she works as a full stack developer in one of the largest technology firms in the U.S. Her son is currently struggling to improve his reading skills, and her daughter is expected to know her fractions and times tables by the end of the academic year. However, with schools moving to online delivery mode because of COVID-19, Tina feels burdened by this change — her kids struggle to reach their academic goals solely with the help of the online teaching and resources that their teachers have provided.
In Jersey City, New Jersey, lives a family of four. John is a delivery driver, and his wife, Katie, is a school teacher. They have two boys — a six-year-old and a five-month-old. John is out for greater part of the days delivering groceries around the city as part of his job, and Katie spends her day teaching her students remotely, while taking care of her own children and completing essential household chores.
When families are hit by adversity or are undergoing some form of disruption, such as that caused by COVID-19, engaging in processes that support family resilience [5] is critical. For example, to build resilience, a family as a unit should engage in meaning making, i.e., construing and making sense of the disruption caused by COVID-19 and its impact on their relationships, and on their life goals more broadly. However, due to the fact that these are unprecedented times, families like those of Tina and John are engrossed in managing virtual learning, working remotely, performing household-tasks (many of which were earlier delegated to others, such as caregivers), and staying up-to-date with state conditions, guidelines, and policies around COVID-19. As a result, families are spending most of their daytime hours with some form of technology, except for rare occasions, such when they step out for occasional walks in the nearby woods, when they can take the time out to have a family dinner, or while playing in the yard, which in many cases do not involve both parents. Overload of technology has been known to have psychological and behavioral side-effects and adult’s technology use around children has been found to be have a significant correlation to their lack of responsiveness to children. Therefore, people can consider to intentionally and regularly observe periods of technology non-use and spend that time as a family during the week.
Past research has shown that when the design of a technology facilitates periods of non-use, it fosters togetherness in families [3, 4]. Therefore, I urge designers to consider enabling non-use through their technologies. This does not mean tracking or restricting the use of specific applications, as technology giants like Apple [1] and Google [2] are currently doing. Instead, this is a call to build in mechanisms that would lead everyone in a family to observe periods of technology non-use and that would encourage them to engage in activities of togetherness and meaning making. One way of achieving this is as follows:
- The technology could enable anyone in the family to trigger a “technology lockdown’’ for everyone in the family through an application installed on a central device, such as a laptop or a tablet. The duration of this lockdown could be mutually decided upon by the family members. Once triggered, every registered device in the household would go into a lockdown mode that allows only two functionalities: emergency calls and disabling the lock-down.
- This central application would then make recommendations on the kind of activities family members could engage in. For example, the application could assign roles to different members of the household and give them a scenario to play out without using any form of technology. The scenario could center on a specific topic that fosters resilience (e.g., how might the family try to achieve a specific goal if a second wave of pandemic hits).
Till the time when such measures are built into technology, it will be helpful if families themselves try to spend some time away from technology and engage in processes that foster family resilience, such as participating in family conversations that normalize and contextualize adversity and distress, facilitate a positive outlook, clarify ambiguous information, identify goals for the future, increase connectedness, provide space for open emotional expression and shared decision making, and prepare the family for future challenges.
Note: The two families described in this article are acquaintances of the author, and their stories are included with their permission. They are referred to by pseudonyms, and some details have been modified to protect their privacy.
References
[1] https://www.apple.com/families/
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/27/17786448/youtube-time-spent-viewing-videos-new-feature
[3] Garg, R., & Sengupta, S. (2019). “ When you can do it, why can’t I?”: Racial and Socioeconomic Differences in Family Technology Use and Non-Use. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), 1–22.
[4] Jensen, R. H., Strengers, Y., Raptis, D., Nicholls, L., Kjeldskov, J., & Skov, M. B. (2018, June). Exploring Hygge as a desirable design vision for the sustainable smart home. In Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 355–360).
[5] Walsh, F. (2003). Family resilience: A framework for clinical practice. Family process, 42(1),1–18.
