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Recently, journalists and researchers have been blaming smartphones for bad parenting. They want us to put down our devices and focus on our children. But they’ve got it all wrong.
It is no wonder that anxiety plagues the modern human. We seem hopelessly confused. We love our tools; we can’t stop creating new technologies, always disrupting our current comfort level with a new solution to a previously inconsequential problem. However, we also love to hate our tools. We blame them for our dissatisfaction. In particular, we’re conflicted about the way we’re tethered to our smartphones.
Disconnection is quickly becoming the new asceticism. My Facebook feed usually includes at least one article which echoes Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” calling for me to unhinge my smartphone shackles and ‘be present’ to the reality that surrounds me. “Free yourself from the Matrix!”
Initially, I smirk at the irony. After all, social media and the smartphone are bedfellows. But we seem to feed on this kind of inconsistency, conflicting narratives are part of the essential human experience. And it gets especially extreme when it comes to parenting and technology.
For example, I take issue with a recent trend that blames the smartphone for bad parenting. Back in March, Jenny S. Radesky and her team published a study in Pediatrics: Official Journal Of The American Academy Of Pediatrics entitled “Patterns of Mobile Device Use by Caregivers and Children During Meals in Fast Food Restaurants.” The results were predictable:
The dominant theme salient to mobile device use and caregiver-child interaction was the degree of absorption in devices caregivers exhibited. Absorption was conceptualized as the extent to which primary engagement was with the device, rather than the child, and was determined by frequency, duration, and modality of device use; child response to caregiver use, which ranged from entertaining themselves to escalating bids for attention, and how caregivers managed their behavior; and separate versus shared use of devices. Highly absorbed caregivers often responded harshly to child misbehavior.
Recognizing that almost all adults in the U.S. are engaged with smartphones these days, the media saw an opportunity for fear mongering. NPR ran the headline, “For The Children’s Sake, Put Down That Smartphone.” TIME covered the study in an article called, “Don’t Text While Parenting--It Will Make You Cranky.” ABC News: “Parent on Smartphones Ignore Their Kids, Study Finds.” In my local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, a pediatrician wrote the most recent iteration of these opinion pieces: “Siri, Can You Make Me A Better Parent.” She talked about the “medical” need for family doctors to discuss smartphone use with parents.
I rolled my eyes, annoyed at the kind of parent shaming that does little to help children. I’d like to see someone evaluate the efficacy of parenting after individuals read articles that make them feel guilty and embarrassed about their behavior. I expect we’d see textbook cases of something I like to call “trickle-down oppression,” in which people inadvertently transfer their suffering down onto to smaller victims. In this case, I expect we’d discover that the parent will end up unconsciously looking for opportunities to shame the child.
What’s more, the publications in which these articles were published are motivated to keep us engaged with our smartphones. Mobile devices provide another opportunity to capture our eyeballs during idle time. The irony is amusing. No matter what they say, articles like these are presumably designed to keep us staring at our smartphones. And it works in a kind of masochistic way. We derive pleasure from the tension, absorbed and entertained by our supposedly bad behavior. Go ahead, the media tells us, satiate your secret desires for sin and taboo and then beat yourself up for it. Meanwhile, industry profits on our fear and dissatisfaction (and continues to buy the advertising that keeps the media ticking).
Almost every article I read about parenting and technology gets it all wrong. The real issue has nothing to do with the smartphones or screentime or video games. There have always been parents that were more engaged than others. The technology has nothing to do with it. When I was a child--before the internet, and long before smartphones--workaholism and too-much-television were the culprits of cranky disengaged parenting. The smartphone is just the newest object onto which we displace our parental guilt.
However, this is not just about smartphones. I travel around the world speaking, consulting, and teaching educators and policy makers about game-based learning. Inevitably, during questions and answers, someone will raise the issue of video game addiction. “Aren’t you afraid,” they ask, “that after they learn from a video game kids won’t be willing to pick up books?” I’m shocked by the absurdity of the question, the implication that exposure to video games are a gateway obsession, the assumption that technology is stronger than the humans that created it. No, I’m not afraid. I assume it is adults’ responsibility to teach children value systems.
We need to stop looking for scapegoats. We need to stop blaming external forces and start taking responsibility for ourselves. Sure, there is plenty of bad parenting. But putting down the smartphone is not going to automatically create good parents. Instead, we need a cultural shift. We need to remember that the biggest impact we can have on the future comes in the form of our children. We need to teach them to see the world in the way we want it look.
With or without devices, most of the parents I see could engage more with their children. And it is not just about quantity of time, it is also about quality of time. Play video games with your kids. Watch animated movies with your kids. Read chapter books to your kids. They are little people, and like all people, when you engage in their world, they become interested in engaging in yours.
Remember that your children are way smarter and more sophisticated than you think. Stop trying to shelter them. You can and should talk to them about most things. You must adjust your language so that they can understand, but you needn’t avoid hard concepts. My sons (ages 7 and 9) and I talked about Ferguson and we talk about the Ukraine. They get death and violence, these are not a dirty words. They are the scary facts of being human that never get less scary. You’re never old enough to be comfortable with these things and you’re never too young to start trying to comprehend them. While we eat dinner, my kids and I sometimes reach for the smartphone to look up facts about world events. I’m teaching them how to use information responsibly. I’m teaching them that the smartphone is a tool not a distraction.
The key point here is that you need to model the behavior you want to teach your children. And most of us (myself included) model it badly sometimes. However, this has nothing to do with new technologies. It has to do with our attitude about work, leisure, income, identity, and employment. We define ourselves by the work that we do rather than as the people that we can be. We define ourselves according to our financial wealth rather than our emotional well being. We define ourselves according to our social capital rather than the quality of our relationships. For this reason, we like to stay connected to these digital labor leashes, electronically dialed-in to our careers, wirelessly connected to our social networks. These devices fortify our identities and that is the problem. This won’t change because we turn off our devices.
What do you want to teach your children? Be the adult you want them to be. In fact, let’s be the society we want them to live in. And let’s stop blaming machines for our own shortcomings.
