Blog Update!
For those of you not following me on Facebook, as of the Summer of 2019 I've moved to Central WA, to a tiny mountain town of less than 1,000 people.

I will be covering my exploits here in the Cascades, as I try to further reduce my impact on the environment. With the same attitude, just at a higher altitude!

Friday, April 26, 2019

Teen Trauma - The horrors of no wifi

Always with phone in hand.
On Wednesday, the World Health Organization released their recommendations for screen time for children under the age of 5. For the first year of life they recommend zero time, rarely any in the second year and no more than an hour a day for ages 2 to 4. Frankly, this seems entirely reasonable, although I might be in the minority here.

My two children didn't watch any television until they were at least 5 and computer time came much later. My 16-year-old son still doesn't have a cell phone (and doesn't want one). It may sound strange coming from two parents who worked in tech, but we weren't TV watching adults, so limiting screen time in the early years came extremely easily.

Fast forward to today and it's a much different story and I know here I'm not in the minority. While my 15 and 16-year-olds don't sit down and watch network television, they watch a lot of shows using Netflix and other entertainment on YouTube. My 15-year-old daughter got her own cell phone in 8th grade after much haranguing and, for her peer group, that's late. Oftentimes, she'll be on her laptop and cell phone at the same time. But, I think that's par for the course for most adults as well.

We've become a modern nation of connectivity with expectations that we have high speed, instantaneous access through our devices to the Internet. This drives most people all day long, every day. Teens and adults. You see them in elevators, in line at the store, waiting for the bus, all staring into their phones. Myself included - I have no pretense to suggest I'm any different.

The main difference is my ability to unplug and put away my devices. A common theme among my teenagers and other teens I know is that, if there isn't access to wifi or cell service, they aren't participating. Sadly, this has been a huge constraint for my family any time we take a trip somewhere. If there isn't high speed wireless Internet available, they aren't going. Which sounds really ridiculous when you put it in writing.

Of course, sometimes you don't have much of a choice - mountainous areas of Washington state just don't have decent coverage to support streaming video. It's not like there's no Internet or cell service, it's just that it's not good enough. Because, predominately, what teens are doing online isn't downloading text to read, articles, news, etc. It's video. And video demands bandwidth. And without that bandwidth, boredom ensues. And then the complaining that's there's nothing to do begins.

One skill that kids seemed to have lost with the advent of constant connectivity is the ability to context switch off the electronic teat, with its incumbent squirts of adrenaline. But, it does happen, with enough time away from their devices. It's just getting through that chunk of time until they realize that they have to come up with something else to do that can be very trying and is, understandably, why parents oftentimes give in.

What about your kids? Are they able to unplug without protest? Do you have issues with your teens refusing to go on vacation because the wifi isn't good enough?


Recommended Reading:
Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction is Highjacking our Kids
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains
Digital Detox: The Ultimate Guide to Beating Technology Addiction

Warning! There are affiliate links in this post!

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