Stop Saying My Teen’s Screen Time is Anti-Social

I’m writing this surfing the black ribbon of Highway 401 in eastern Ontario, headed for Quebec, Canada. The Man is at the wheel and my 8 seater Chevy Suburban, which looks like a vehicle of ridiculous excess on Tuesdays when it is just myself and my one remaining 13 year old grocery shopping before his bagpipe lesson. Today, however, we get a gold star for per-person fuel efficiency as we’ve stuffed it to the gills with six teenagers, plus one, with four continents represented.

If you haven’t road tripped with a truck packed full of teenagers, you haven’t lived. And if you think that just because they’ve got phones and iPods they’re quiet, you’re sadly mistaken.

The Back Row…

The back row consists of Ezra: 13, with 25 countries and 3 continents under his belt. Sporting the t-shirt Grammy brought him from Peru this summer, he’s firmly committed to driving us crazy today.

Next to him, William, 18, with 16 countries and 3 continents to his name, we collected in Germany, by accident, when we were cycling through when he was 10 and Hannah was 11; they stuck.

Hannah, 19, is wearing a flour sack t-shirt from Mexico and rolls her eyes when I ask for the count. We don’t, in general, believe in counting such things. It doesn’t matter, not even a little. She is reticent to tell me she is at 27 & 6.

The Front Row…

The front row finds Dhyani, newly 18, reading my book, What To Do When It’s Your Turn (and it’s always your turn) by Seth Godin. She has a braid that reaches to her knees. She met our kids in sailing classes on Wolfe Island when they were all young and wiggly. She does not volunteer her count, but beams that she’s been to 15 countries and 4 continents, when I ask. “I don’t remember them all…” she demurs. She comes from a family of travelers too.

Gabe, 18 next month, has his arm around her. His lanky frame extends from the backseat to the front and his size 11 feet are taking up space between his Dad and me. He counts in his head… “32 and 5 mom,” he reports.

Nathaniel, the Australian ambassador, is last. he’s 13 and celebrated his birthday off of his home continent this year. He’s been to 4 countries and 2 continents thus far, but his family just started traveling for a living this past year. We met his family when we were knocking around Australia for a few months. They camped through the Outback with us for fun. He’s the oldest of six kids.

I should mention that we are missing Elisha today, he’s 15 and in the third week of a month long trip to Guatemala, alone. He saved the money himself and has executed an entire month of solo travel and volunteer work in a country that is a second (or third?) home for him. How is it possible, with a full load, to be still down one?

This Makes For a Full Truck

We are on our way to Mt. Tremblant, 3 hours away, for a weekend ski trip. All extra space is filled with winter gear, 14 skis and loud rock music. We gave up on listening to The Soul of an Octopus over an hour ago.

Sarah joined us for a while, between Brockville and Cornwall. Gabe was busy cutting large slabs of sourdough bread and cheddar cheese so he propped her in the space next to his Dad and I visited with her while we rolled. Sarah is 15. We met her in New Zealand years ago. She’s now on a year long exchange program in Argentina. She is the best traveled of the bunch, at 37 countries and 6 continents.

This snapshot of the interior of my popcorn and soda can littered vehicle is a very fair representation of any given day when my children and their friends assemble. There is never a day when a second or third continent does not Skype in. And the text conversations flying through the ether are beyond my interest in numbering, or keeping up with.

To Me, Social Media is a Miracle

When I was a kid, I had so many pen pals that my parents finally made me pay for my own postage. The digital world has only expanded my capacity to keep in touch with dozens of people a day, and I do. My children are lucky enough to grow up in a world where community does not know boundaries.

I have little patience for the people in my life who complain, when they see my young people face down in their phones, that they’re “not socializing.”

We’ve always had plenty of structure around the real world etiquette of device usage. None of my kids would sit down at a dinner table, phone in hand. They understand the middle-aged economy of “eye contact equals attention” and they know how to speak that language fluently. However, when they are face down in their phones there is a very good possibility that they are diligently about the hard work of relationship building and maintenance.

And, when they’re gathered as a big gangly group around someone’s phone barfing annoying YouTube sounds into the room, you can bet they are socializing, in all of the best ways, according to the definition of their generation. Don’t tell me my kids aren’t socializing, they most certainly are, and odds are, they’re better at it than you are because they can fluently juggle two worlds, where the folks of my generation, no matter how savvy, still feel the pull between the two.

Stop Ragging The Kids

Young people of this generation take a lot of heat for the ways in which they are evolving past the limits of their parents’ generations.

• They’re told they’re wasting time, lacking social skills, and being “dumbed down” by the easy access of information on the internet.
• They are mocked over their propensity to selfie with little regard to where they are at any given moment.
• They are dissed for being so plugged into the virtual world that they can’t live in the “real world.”

I Disagree

As the mother of four teenagers (who were raised, largely, without media for the first decade of their lives) who have almost no limits on their device usage or internet access, I beg to disagree.

• I would make the argument that this generation of young people are actually smarter, more highly evolved and far more resourceful than we ever hoped to be in our youth.
• They have the great benefit of the world at their finger tips. This is increasing the cross-cultural literacy of the human population and reducing prejudices at a rate we couldn’t have imagined forty years ago.

My kids have figured out, with no difficulty whatsoever, how to live in an analog world (you should have seen them swinging their way through the square dance on Wolfe Island last night) while simultaneously actively participating in a global community in ways that will change the history of the world.

They’re Redefining The World

They aren’t failing to participate in the real world when their faces are stuck in their phones, they are redefining it. Look at a photo of people making a commute in 1950's. What do you see? Faces in newspapers, getting the news, connecting with the world in the best way technology allowed. Teenagers gathered around radios and TV screens before there was YouTube.

The argument could be made that the rise of smartphones has actually freed us to participate in community more, because they go everywhere with us.

Gone are the days of organizing your schedule around the 6 o’clock news or that show everyone in the family wanted to watch that only came on Wednesdays at 8:30 p.m. Heaven forbid that it be missed!

In our kids’ world, they’re free to connect in the real world and pull up all of the news and entertainment at their convenience. How freeing!

Humanity is Evolving

We’re redefining culture and community, and our kids are at the cutting edge of that revolution. Their weapon in the war: their smartphones. I can’t tell you how much I value the screen time that my kids invest in with their friends around the world. I can’t tell you how glad I am to have this truck filled with teenagers who we, quite literally, would not have in this vehicle today if it were not for social media and the smartphone. This real world adventure, brought to you by: screen time!

• Next week Elisha will surf back into our real world after a month on the virtual wave length.
• Nathaniel’s family will pass back out of our face to face community and back into the online circle.
• I threaten William, good naturedly, with reportage to his mother, who is in Germany in in my circle of virtual friends.

And as my young people spin in every larger orbits away from my center I am thankful that they’re plugged in people and I will battle to keep up in their world.

And no, I won’t be telling my kids to put their phones away, so don’t bother complaining. They’re doing stuff that matters to them, and stuff that I think matters to the world. They’re creating their communities, cultivating their tribes and creating a future, collectively, that doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to them, and I trust them to build it.

Photo Credits: Laura Smith & Boston Public Library