How Can Parents Support a Phone-Free & Play-Full Childhood?

What do you remember most from middle school? Middle school was a lot different when we were kids, no matter what generation you were growing up in:

• Late practices in the warming weather; the smell of the grass in that first baseball game of the season. 
• School dances; awkwardly approaching your crush to ask for a dance, your friends and theirs standing around you in a circle, hooting and hollering. 
• Putting off homework while you talked to your friends on the phone--always keeping one ear open for the click if someone picked up the phone in another room. 
• Passing notes in class.
• Doodling all over your papers and binders with flowers, spiky "S"s, and 3D boxes.

What do these memories all have in common? Nobody had a smartphone to take your picture at that school dance & post it later. No alerts and buzzes in your pocket drew you away from the moment on the ballfield. To call your friend, you had to call their house and ask a parent if they were available; a quick moment when you had to introduce yourself and say please and thank you, when the other parent might ask how you're doing and check in. Instead of a momentary "snap" from your crush, you could hold the note they'd left in your locker and trace their handwriting; you could dote over every detail in the note you wanted to pass them the next day. This physical being in the real world is something the online life in smartphones just cannot capture in the same way, and it's exactly the sort of feedback an adolescent's brain & body needs. If you've ever seen teen boys wrestling like bear cubs, or tween girls playing with their friends' hair, you know exactly what I mean! 

Cell phones are an easy way to stay in touch with your kids, and it's comforting to know you could reach them if you needed to. But did we really agree to let our kids be distracted and harassed 24-7. It's convenient for adults to have a camera at all times, your calendar at your fingertips, an alarm clock, the newspaper, a calculator. Do our kids need all these apps? What else are they spending time doing on a screen you can't see? What else could they be doing if we helped them stay away from the distractions of social media, video games, and every algorithm out there? Are there ways to bring more fun-- live & in person!-- into your kids' lives before they grow up too fast, start working, and move out?

This Thursday night, at 7pm in the South Library, we'll be discussing all these questions and more. If you've been reading Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation, come and be heard! If you have not read or listened to the book, you certainly still have ideas about all of this: come and be heard! If you've got other sources from the news or whatever magazines or podcasts you consume, come share those ideas!

See you all tomorrow night at 7:00 PM in the South Library to discuss how we can support our kids to let them enjoy a phone-free, play-filled childhood while they are still kids. You're only young once, and don't we all wish we could have some of those days back again??