Neutralize the Tech Effect

In this video three generations of family members are asked what they did or do (respectively) for fun. They give three VERY different answers. Spoiler Alert: Being on technology of one kind or another, was the kid's answer. Playing outside, was the older generations response. Many problematic behaviors we see with young people can be attributed to the influence of tech and the absence of play - quick temper, bad attitude, short attention span and obsessive attachment to their electronics. I call this the Tech Effect.

The Tech Effect is causing real problems for our children. It's impacting their school performance, their ability to build relationships but I believe the most serious and dangerous issue is the hitch, the disconnect it is causing in our families. We know we have a problem though right? Is there anyone who doesn't think we have a growing problem with our young people and technology?

It's time we started talking about how we neutralize the Tech Effect. We cannot eliminate it. Sure, we could live under a rock, I suppose. But our children will inherit a world that runs on ever-advancing technology so I wouldn't suggest rock life.

What they will benefit from is hands on, involved parenting with purpose. Here are 5 ways we can begin to neutralize the Tech Effect on our children and in our family.

1. Modeling There are a couple components to correcting the modeling of parents. First, we aren't any more interested in abandoning our electronics than our kids, if we're being honest - we love our phones, tablets, tv, dvd's in the car and handheld gaming devices. We use them personally and we pacify our kids with them. We must stop. If it's bad for them, it's bad for us. Screen Time tracking is available on most phones. We can use it to assess our use and set limits. We can decide when we will use it in a limited way and the rest of the time we can put it away.

We must stop handing over the iPad or phone to keep them entertained. Leave it in a drawer at home. Don't charge it. Instead, be prepared to engage with your children. Parents are seriously out of practice on how to hang out with their kids. We need to be more prepared. Get a Mad Lib book and when you are waiting at the doctor's office, or a restaurant, do Mad Libs. Keep a deck of cards and a spiral notebook/pen in your purse and in your car. Play Hangman, dots and boxes, pictionary. Get silly putty. Engage with them through play. Put your phone on silent, or better yet, Do Not Disturb when you are together. At a minimum - MINIMUM put your phone on Do Not Disturb during family hours in the evening (you can make exceptions who will ring through). Start DND when your kids get home. Check messages for 30 minutes after they are in bed and leave it alone again. When you are with your children show them that they are more important than your texts, your social media and chats with friends. The modeling problems go much deeper though. The second component of modeling we need to address is the exhaustion. What children are also modeling is the mad pace their parents are living everyday. Parents are burned out. We have crammed so much into our lives, I believe it's actually making us sick - physically, mentally, emotionally, and certainly spiritually. Parents use technology (same as kids) because life is often too overwhelming. "Adulting" is an actual word. And the tech allows us to zone out, escape.

Parents are juggling more than ever before in the pursuit of success and survival. For our generation, success has been defined in a way that means - more. More house, more money, more cars, more perfection in our home, more competition, more from our kids, more activities, more commitments, more, more, more.

We are hyper-scheduling ourselves AND our children and setting expectations of them that have them living life at the same pace that is breaking us. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA) 40 million adults, or over 18% of adults in America are affected by anxiety and depression. The National Institute of Health reports 6.7% of adults are in treatment for Alcohol Abuse. Shall we add stats for suicide, drugs, obesity, stress, and other addictions? We're in trouble as a culture. We need to recognize that the pace of life we are setting for not only ourselves but our children is not healthy. We need more sleep. We need a healthier diet. We need more down time (without technology). We need fewer obligations. We need to model for our children what a healthy lifestyle looks like. We need to put away phones and pick up books. We need less tv and more time just being outdoors - not organized, not productive, just outside, getting our hands dirty. We need to examine our lifestyle and identify areas we can slow down and play with our kids. They need this, but we need it too. 2. Peer Focus The second way to be impactful in neutralizing the Tech Effect is to neutralize the effect of a child's peers. They can become the focus of their world. The tech that keeps them connected to them feels essential to their very existence. Text, social media, gaming systems and calls are their life lines. The Tech Effect is most challenging with teens because of the ability to connect with their peers that it provides. Their peers place of primacy in their lives must be neutralized. It's done by intentionally creating a strong Family Life, away from peers. Peers will become important in their lives as they grow but they do not have to take over their world. It doesn't have to be this way.

To have the hearts of our children turned back toward their family, we have to choose more time with them. An hour at night, a free Saturday afternoon on occasion, it is not going to cut it. Not even close. It's not enough. Relationships need TIME. We have to trim back the schedules. Make hard choices. Have so much time that we have the room to get bored and creative. It's a grave error to think that once kids are in middle school and high school that they don't need us as much. It's just wrong. They need us MORE. They need someone at home. The hours after school are when so many bad ideas are hatched. Internet pornography, online bullying. The loneliness and depression that sets in for kids. We need to be there. Stand in the gap. While you're standing in the gap. Make some food. It's not as hard to connect with teenagers as you might imagine. Warm cookies, snacks, whatever, it works. Make food and talk. Good food is always a way into their heart. You can build an intentional family life by having common interests. Serve at the soup kitchen every week. Sing in the choir together. Run in the evening and train for 5k events. Start a business with your child, enjoy hobbies and art together. Be interested in their interests and do them alongside them. Get smart about peers. Start a book club with just a couple friends and the moms. Handpick the peers your children will be exposed to by vetting the parents. If you do not share common values, and an ability to enforce and hold those standards, don't give them access to your children. Start a weekly board game night with them, and keep the circle small. Bring them into small parts of the family time. Especially when you are restructuring, bringing in one friend here or there can help reset the habits and shift the focus back home.

3. Re-Think Organized Activities Organized activities need to be limited. They are an enormous strain on family time and they fuel the peer focus. They also contribute to the problem of overscheduling and living life at a chaotic pace. We must limit them. This is so hard. They look like great opportunities. They seem productive and healthy. But the stories I could tell you from Scouts, Travel Teams, even youth group - Yikes! The days of an entire gaggle of neighborhood kids playing away the summer is only a quaint memory now. My hope is that this over-scheduled generation of children will rebel when they raise their own families and maybe just maybe, we can reclaim childhood. Families are enslaved to organized activities. Mommy needs wine because all she does is drive around like an Uber shuttling kids and gear to fields and events. Every member of the family is going in a different direction. Describing the impact this has on the marriage, is a whole other post. Suffice it to say, it can suffer greatly and you may not even know it until the kids move out.

Family calendars look like we are planning the Invasion of Normandy. Isn't it too much? What if activity wasn't organized, and we were just I don't know, active with our own kids? These activities strain our budgets as well. Some activities break the bank they are so ridiculously indulgent. It's not always wise or fair to the family as a unit. Only you can decide when it's gotten away from you, but don't be afraid to examine it carefully. Some people believe that kids in organized activities are less impacted by the Tech Effect, at least they are occupied. The peers from their teams and groups are very important to them. On breaks you see them, heads down, on phones. All the conversations, flirting, bullying, and anything else parents don't want their kids doing is happening with the kids they know from these activities. It's school, sports, scouts, dance, youth group, you name it. It's a lot to manage and they aren't equipped to navigate it all. We have come to believe that outsourcing the raising of our children in all these ways is impossible to avoid. It's not true.

Limit these activities. They do not need constant activity. They do not need their entire existence scheduled for them. Use this litmus test. Is the participation about the activity or the peers? Can you show up just for the meetings, or the practice and play, then leave? Or is the real driving force all the time they get with their friends? Do they panic if they miss out on something? Why is that? Are they afraid they will be the subject of conversation? They will lose ranking among peers? We have to drill down on the activities if we are to choose them well for our kids. Let's not forget the other kids and parents. Siblings end up being dragged along, no one even asks them if they think their sibling should sign up for a travel team or go all over competing. Mom and Dad often go two different directions most of the time just to keep up. When this becomes the norm, and not the occasional, it's time to think about it.

Activities can be wonderful. No matter what level you are engaged in, it's worth an assessment. If anything feels like a sacred cow, it's a clue that maybe the activities have become an idol and maybe we need to rethink it. Reclaiming time lost in activity gives us the raw time we need to build an intentional family and address the Tech Effect. This is not a criticism of all activity. It's a criticism of over-scheduling. 4. The Great Lie of Quality Time and Genius of Carefree Timelessness Quality time is a made up thing. It didn't used to exist. It came into existence to soothe our guilt about being too busy for all our relationships. We latched on to it because it was a life preserver that we hoped would spare our families, our marriages and friendships. Yeah, yeah we never see each other but if every now and then we can have "quality time" it won't matter. Wrong. What we all need more of is quantity time. Afternoons curled up on a couch with a good book. Kids playing in the grass while we garden. Doing yard work and making lunch together. LONG luxurious hours of nothingness with no end in sight. It's in the nothingness that good things are cultivated. Imagination. Peace. Creativity. Deep breaths and giggles. Like us, our children are more medicated than ever in history. Small children are managing anxiety, depression, attention disorders and more mental health challenges than I can count. All this motion is contributing to a manic existence for everyone and no one is managing it well. If this is the "real world" is it any wonder they are escaping into a virtual one? What if instead of juggling too much and always trying to find a way to balance it like a circus act, we just let some things drop? What if we just decided to stay home together.

Relationships flourish with carefree timelessness. Where the hours go by and we don't even notice. When the day ends and we wish it could go on forever. That doesn't have to be relegated to a day or two of a vacation each year. LIFE, real life can be lived this way. Every week. The single best way to neutralize the Tech Effect is to reclaim time with our children. Restore their childhood. Engage them in play. Let them be little. Stop focusing on planning big, jam-packed, weekend adventures and start focusing on quantity time. Pick strawberries, ride bikes, bake cookies, listen to music. Marriages, families and close personal friendships need carefree timelessness to thrive, Tech-Free time like this is how we neutralize the Tech Effect.

5. Meals We live in huge houses now. More square feet per person than at any time in history. Big empty houses, where no one is home. Technology has replaced actual human interaction in many ways. Meal times are lost in the chaos of our too busy lives. Reclaim daily meals and we can make major headway. Families once had 2-3 meals a day together. Now the goal is to have at least one family meal each week. One. How did we get to a place where we accepted this? We can tell the trend by the commercials on tv. There used to be commercials for actual food. Families were once depicted sitting at a table having their meals. As we got busier (coincidentally as technology improved) we went from real breakfast to cold breakfast cereal, pop tarts, toaster waffles. Lunches became Lunchables and real dinners morphed into tv dinners, microwave dinners, and "helper" meals. Now we have meal replacement bars you can toss to your family on your way out the door. We are sustained largely on processed food and take out and we wonder why we are so sick? We eat on the run most of the time. There is no calm, no nourishment of the soul, no real food, there's no real family time during family meals. If we try to eat together it's on the clock before we rush out, or after we rush in and then we hustle to baths and homework. Always scheduled. When I look at the lives our children are living today I don't ask why they prefer video games, tablets, snapchats and texts to interacting with real people or sitting outside under a tree. I think if I were small today and living the average American kid life, I might want to escape too. Can we be less defensive and examine what is actually happening with our kids, our families? This is the only life we have - every member of the family - this is it. Don't we want to stop walking in anxiety and stress and slow down?

Make real food, enjoy the process. Cook together, eat together, clean up together. Talk and have dessert while we play a board game. Keep the tv off and pile up in pajamas and blankets and listen to a great audio book while you color or build with Legos (yeah we're those nerds). 22 years ago I left that life behind with my husband's support and we began to build a simple life, a life worth living for our family. This is the good life. We deserve it. Our children do too. It's not easy to unravel a life that has gotten away from us, but it is simple. Just stop. Technology is not going away. We shouldn't be trying to resist it. We should be teaching our kids how to put it in its' place and how to live a healthy life in its' wake.

The Tech Effect is real and the problems are serious. What is cute and funny at age 8 is a serious problem at 16. Lonely kids fall prey to porn and depression. Overinvolved kids suffer anxiety. These problems do not miraculously manifest themselves at 15. They were planted usually by the parents who purchased the gear in very early years. They were watered, kept alive and nurtured into full blown issues. We can't be shocked when it becomes a problem. Who knew giving a 2nd grader a $1000 smart phone would be a bad idea? We have a phenomenon with young adults today. A "failure to launch". Twenty-somethings are living at home, dressing in pajamas, playing video games and working part time jobs, unable to adult in the real world. People want to blame a millennial mindset. All I see is young people who lost their childhood and they are trying to recapture it. We have to neutralize the Tech Effect and it begins with restoring the family. Roll it all back. Start today.