My 6-year-old son recently staged a one-man play in our kitchen. It had a simple plot — a mom with her face buried in her phone tapping away at the keys while a kid tries to get her attention. “Tap, tap, tap…Mom. Mom. Mom….Tap, tap, tap. Mom, Mom, Mom. Tap, tap, tap. MOM! MOM! MOM!” Thank you, bow. Applause. Exit stage left (through the kitchen door.) That was it. He played both parts.
Ouch.
The crazy thing is that I’m the spokesperson for the National Day of Unplugging and I drank the Kool-Aid. I’m super careful about my cell phone use and I regularly put it away when I’m around my two boys. When my phone rings and is nearby, my son automatically says, “Decline,” and reaches to press the red button because he knows that I generally no longer answer if we are together.
But I’m no saint and the phone creeps in sometimes. I’ll give my kids an apologetic look and say that I just need to make that one call or answer that one text. The phone still beeps, rings and vibrates too much. All it takes is a look around pretty much anywhere you go and you can see why kids are so sensitive to it.
We are a generation of helicopter parents. We are always with our children, at the soccer practices and games, at the school performances, on the field trips. But if you watch, we aren’t actually present. We are on our phones.
A reporter I talked to about the upcoming National Day of Unplugging on March 6–7, 2015, said that she can remember her mom ignoring her, sitting with her back to the kids while she was tied to the curly cord of the home phone talking with her friends. But we agreed that the difference was that that phone couldn’t go with her mom everywhere she went. It was attached to the wall and when she left the house, she left it behind. Now our phones, our email, our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram go with us everywhere. It is now Mommy and Me and the phone.
I recently ran a booth inviting families to make cell phone bags to stash away their digital devices. One dad said, “Oh wow, we really need this,” and turned to his daughter and asked, “Sweetheart, who is mommy’s best friend?” Without pause, the little girl, who was no older than five years old answered, “Her phone.”
Ouch.
As smartphones invade our daily activities, parents are increasingly less present and available for their children. In a study released in 2014, researchers at Boston Medical Center observed 55 groups of parents and young children eating at fast food restaurants and found that 72 percent of caregivers pulled out a mobile device right away and mostly ignored the children throughout the meal.
“We have reached a tipping point where technology has invaded every aspect of our lives and is turning our friends and families into proverbial third wheels,” said Robin Kramer, executive director of Reboot, which established the National Day of Unplugging in 2010 to encourage people to be more mindful of their digital use. “We are encouraging people to take a pause to unplug and engage in life without digital connections, and to also take stock of their tech use and its impact. Most people probably don’t realize how profound it is.”
Of course we as parents can’t give our kids our undivided attention all the time. That’s not healthy either. They need to learn to entertain themselves, to be independent. But it’s about a balance and we do need to be more aware of the message we are sending our kids and others around us.
Experts in the area say that kids today feel second in importance to their digital devices.
Ouch.
I met with a bunch of teenagers recently and one after another they said how ignored they felt by their parents because they were always on their digital devices. Teenagers?! They don’t even want their parents around all the time! Yet they weren’t getting enough face time.
“My mom, when she is on her phone (texting or emailing or on Facebook), she doesn’t even talk to me. I will try to talk to her about important stuff but she’s on her phone and she doesn’t even look up. It happens a lot,” said one teen.
“My dad will just ignore me when I’m trying to talk to him. I don’t think it is intentional. He will be on his email or on Facebook and there is just a big silence when I say something. I just get angry,” said another teen.
Parenting experts warn that pervasive digital distractions are harming interpersonal relationships, hindering youth from developing face-to-face communication skills and parent behavior is teaching children that disappearing into digital devices for endless hours is an appropriate pastime.
A 2014 study by UCLA researchers found that sixth graders who spent five days screen-free were better at reading facial expressions and nonverbal cues of human emotion at the end of the period than classmates who used smartphones and watched television or other digital screens.
We have reset societal expectations so that making the phone the most important thing in the room is acceptable. So that it is acceptable to be talking to one person and texting another at the same time. So that it is acceptable to sit together at a table on our phones and not talking.
We have to change. I feel a little like “We Are the World,” might just spontaneously start playing right now. But I just want to stop my son’s from taking his play to Broadway.
The National Day of Unplugging is one day a year that encourages people to be mindful of the impact of their use of digital devices throughout the year. Find out more at http://www.nationaldayofunplugging.com/
