We're Reading: Parenting While Plugged In

The New York Times has an interesting article today about parenting in the digital age.

“Over and over, kids raised the same three examples of feeling hurt and not wanting to show it when their mom or dad would be on their devices instead of paying attention to them: at meals, during pickup after either school or an extracurricular activity, and during sports events.” Yikes.

The article also points out that technology may be changing the language divide that has typically been found in families of different SES levels. Essentially, researchers have shown repeatedly that kids who are raised in higher SES households hear many thousands more words during early childhood than children raised in lower SES households. However, the advent of parenting while checking your iPhone for the eightieth time that day limits how many words parents say to their kids. Hmmmm.

When we bought a new computer a year before Mr. J was born, we intentionally got a desktop with the idea that it would limit our random surfing. If you have to physically leave the rest of the family to get on the computer, it's a little more of a limit.

But then Chuck was issued a laptop by his school and I needed a laptop for my school so we're back to square 1. Add in two iPhones and we're the poster children for potential distracted parenting. It's really tempting when we're both mentally burned out to just turn on the TV or laptop and float through the family time.

But we don't really want to do that. An author I like, Zadie Smith dedicated one of her books with the quote, " Time is how you spend your love." I think it's very true that children don't understand very much about how much we love them. They really only understand what we DO with them and how we act. Children know when we're dividing our attention and really, there is nothing on a screen that I want to spend my time on more than my family.

So we've instituted a few rules.

1) We can watch the BBC World News at 5PM and the National News at 5:30PM, but then the TV goes off until Mr. J goes to bed.

2) We can check our e-mail once before Mr. J goes to bed, but iPhones and laptops need to stay in the bag until after bedtime. This occasionally gets broken when one of us has a time sensitive work thing.

3)No TV on Saturday at all. Mr. J has sorta stopped taking naps. He needs to chill out for a few hours in the middle of the day or he has a rough evening. We're still trying to figure out calm restful activities that will actually keep his attention better than just letting him watch a movie.

4) I quit Facebook partially because it was just a huge time suck that really added very little to my life. I'm also trying to be very good about using my personal e-mail only for personal stuff. My work e-mail is a pain to get into off campus which makes me less likely to check it from my phone and therefore less likely to obsessively check it all evening.

We're doing fairly well, but the lure of the screen is always there. And yes, I realize it's a little crazy to be writing about limiting computer time on a blog but there it is.