Fumbling for the Reins: Our children, screens and a run-away cart
Fall is my season to mark papers from the summer courses I teach. I was reading one of my student’s papers, a case study that she chose to write about her daughter. She wrote of this beautifully blossoming young adolescent at the cusp of 13.
In her own words:
“she is full of initiative and ideas”
“she sets goals for herself”
“she enjoys novel and unknown situations”
“she accepts limits and restrictions”
“she talks about her plans and the sports teams she plans to join”
“she has big dreams for herself, talking about running her own business someday”
“she has demonstrated courage”
“she loves the chance to do things on her own but is also reassured when she can call a parent to check in”
So what is the problem, one might ask?
Well, her newly adolescent daughter was entering into the enticing world of cell phones. And her mother was trying to navigate this with her, questioning how to preserve her daughter’s real life interests, curiosities and emerging uniqueness in the luring face of peers and social media.
This is a struggle for those who are without any significant challenges in their life, but what if you have someone who is already in a state of alarm, alarmed enough to cause scattered attention? What if you have someone who is already in a place of heightened pursuit, where they are desperate for a sign of significance or mattering? What if you have someone who is already vulnerable to filling the voids in their life with other things in order to escape feeling the pains and the lacks? This is where the lure of social media becomes amplified.
The challenge that we are dealing with is that these devices are made to feed into our greatest needs and insecurities as human beings. And yet, they are not designed to satiate in the same way as a human connection. What do we do with this?
We are up against an epidemic of screens that scream for our attention and distract from the things in life that matter most. As a society we are starting to see the need to curb this. We are scrambling now to put some boundaries in place, whether it’s banning cell phones at school or putting on parental controls, but the problem has gotten too big, too out of hand. Like a train that has lost its caboose and is careening down the track. Or a horse-drawn cart that has drawn too much momentum and has overtaken the horse, charting a course all its own.
How do we take back the reins? The run-away cart needs a driver.
Let me go back to the story of this mother and her budding adolescent daughter and share the ways that she is attempting to get back in the driver’s seat.
setting aside more device-free time to read books, watch a show together or go out on walks
introducing more family outdoor activities, leaning into more of the play she enjoyed as a child
encouraging her daughter to talk more with herself and her brothers about her friendships and hear from them how they have learned to navigate the influences of other kids
encouraging her daughter to share her opinions more
taking technology lessons from her oldest son so she is aware of what is going on in the cyber world and the latest “advances”
speaking openly about what kinds of things she is seeing or might be seeing online and how to handle different situations
having open conversations about sexuality
restricting phone use during the day more often
locking away the phone at night
leaving her own phone behind when she is with her daughter
Our children and students need us. And they need space to move, to create, to be in nature and to help others in need. This requires some curating and intentional buffering to preserve this kind of space in their lives.
So what is needed? Times of togetherness and matchmaking to outlets for creative expression and meaningful connections with others and the natural world around them. It’s so simple in the end. But not always so easy to find our way back when the cart is rolling down the hill and gaining speed. I think it’s worth it in the end to fumble our way back to the reins. It may be messy and it may cause much upset – but in the end any move in this direction will make a difference.