Parents should band together to "say 'no' to smart phones and social," writes Laura Yuen in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. She dreams of giving her 11-year-old son the kind of "free-range" childhood she enjoyed in the '80s. But she needs other parents to agree to let kids play, untethered.
"Generation Z (born in 1996 or later) are more anxious and depressed than previous generations," she writes. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, blames the rising tide of anxiety on smart phones, social media and "the loss of a play-based childhood," Yuen notes. "The age in which the typical parent now deems their child old enough to play unsupervised at a public park is 14," according to Haidt.
We Baby Boomer kids walked or bicycled to school on our own, starting in kindergarten. We organized our own games in the park -- or played on the street. Our mothers were busy taking care of a baby or toddler. I was 13 when my surprise brother was born, and I became a trusted babysitter.
Haidt recommends: No smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools and lots more unsupervised play and independence in the real world.
Yuen organized a day at a park a few blocks away for her son and his friends, warning other parents she would not be supervising. The moms agreed it would be a screen-free event.
After a few hours, some of boys pedaled back to her house to report a fight. "What started with trash talking over their ball-playing escalated into a thrown punch to the face, an intense headlock and wrestling to the ground," she writes. Was the day a failure? "To my surprise, my friends, even the moms of the boys involved in the skirmish, said no."
Kids need to figure things out without adults. They should take risks, even if that means messing up. They must engage with the real world — from playing games to wandering to the ice cream store — and test their social waters. (And when I think about it, trash talking and fighting were also part and parcel of our idyllic '80s childhoods.)
The boys apologized to each other and remained friends.
If parents "joined forces, we could set a new cultural norm," Yuen concludes.
Los Angeles Unified will go phone-free in January, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants a statewide cellphone ban, emulating Florida and Indiana.
Enforcement is challenging, reports the New York Times. Some teachers want to be able to use phones in lessons. Most don't want to be constantly telling students to put their phones away. Many parents want to keep in touch with their children at all times. Schools that buy pouches to lock away phones during the day seem to have the most success.
As with all of my neighbors, the phone issue begins with sports and extracurriculars. When one is depending on others to transport one's child, the child needs a method to communicate. The issue is whether a parent will willing to stick their child with a non-smart phone.
For those parents who feel an obsessive need to be in constant contact with their children, you can still buy non-smart phones. They are dirt cheap so it's a good way to save money as well. Phone calls and texts.
Back in the day, I demonstrated the social undesirability of smartphones by beginning a lecture with a fake phone call, effectively "phubbing" the whole class. With remarks like "no, nothing important, I'm just fixin' to give a lecture," etc.
Then I ended the call and told the class "That was really rude and annoying, no? For future class meetings, would those of you who prefer to phone fidget or surf the web during the lecture, please sit in the back two rows? I found it disgusting to sit behind a young lady in grad school as she surfed through Chinese cooking videos with utterly revolting ingredients."
Apparently, my students got the message, and pretty much only deployed their smart phones…