My household is very seldom at the cutting edge of technology, so I assumed when we decided to drop our traditional phone line and use cell phones exclusively, we were at the back end of a trend that had already swept the country.
But as friends, relatives and business contacts aagradually became aware of the change we’d made, I discovered that this time we were closer to, if not at, the forefront of a movement. Of those individuals who had already gone home-phone-free when we did a year and a half ago, the typical demographic was young single people. We discovered it was still quite unusual for a household like ours – a suburban family of four consisting of two middle-aged adults and two school-aged children – to make what seemed to most of our cohort like a radical domestic change.
And yet people were curious. It turned out to be one of those things that a lot of adults were considering, even if they couldn’t quite persuade themselves it was a good idea.
For us, it’s been great. First of all, as with any new or unlisted phone number, our numbers were unknown to telemarketers, political parties, alumni groups and charities, and it has remained that way in the ensuing year and a half, so we get phone calls only from people who have a reason to know our number, either because we gave it to them directly or filled out paperwork they had access to or someone else we know gave it to them.
It also means the only people who call me are people who specifically want to talk to me, and the same is true for my husband. We’re no longer stuck making small talk with each other’s co-workers, college friends or poker buddies just because we happened to be the one standing closest to the phone when it rang.
Admittedly, this aspect also has a downside: there’s an intrinsic social value to some of those unintentional conversations. These days I almost never talk to my mother-in-law on the phone unless she’s deliberately trying to reach me to make plans or to ask me about a family event – most of the time, she calls my husband directly, and I miss the chit-chat we used to have before I put him on the phone.
Still, it saves a lot of time. No longer do I have to field calls from the parents of the kids on the baseball team my husband coaches. Either they reach him directly or they leave a message on his voicemail.
I also really like the privacy aspect of it. It is often argued that privacy is a casualty of modern-day society, and yet I like the fact that people who call me have no way of knowing where I am. When I answer my cell phone, I might be in my kitchen, I might be at the beach, I might be in a doctor’s waiting room, I might be at the shopping mall. This is useful personally but also professionally. Last year when I went to Colorado for a week, I didn’t even tell my editors; I didn’t want them to avoid giving me assignments just because I was out of town. As it happened, my editor did call while I was away to see if I could do a story that didn’t require on-the-spot coverage, and I was happy to take it on, because I often welcome the opportunity to earn some income while I’m traveling. If she had known I was away from home for the week, she probably wouldn’t have bothered to call me about the story.
The downsides have mostly to do with the overlap between being an individual and being part of a family. My 13-year-old has his own phone, but my 9-year-old doesn’t, and when her friends want to make plans, they use my number. This is fine if we’re all at home together but can be inconvenient if I’m out of town and she’s at home. I once called my husband while I was in Chicago to tell him that the neighbor down the street wanted to know if Holly could come over to play. It becomes a fairly inefficient use of communication at that point.
Going land-line free is also probably not a good idea for parents who often have babysitters in the house. In an emergency, you don’t want to have to rely on someone else having their phone close at hand.
The other caveat I mention when people ask about the arrangement is that if you’re accustomed to a household in which three or four different extensions ring each time you get a phone call, you have to remember that cell phones are one unit per number. That means if you leave your phone downstairs and you go upstairs, you won’t be able to answer the phone if it rings. And with consideration to extreme emergencies such as fires, you have to remember to bring your phone to the bedroom with you at night.
It’s worked out well for us, though. I’m not someone who gets inundated with phone calls, and I like knowing that if there’s information I need, it will reach me whether I’m home or away. Considering how many people have asked me about the arrangement, I really do believe it’s the wave of the future. And in this day and age, anything that gives an increased, rather than decreased, sense of privacy is worth at least a little bit of consideration.
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Friday, April 27, 2012
Friday, March 18, 2011
Smartphone-free and fully focused
Because my kids are not exactly brimming over with intellectual curiosity every day, it can take a bit of effort on my part to get them to enjoy a cultural excursion. So when they agreed to my suggestion that we visit the Salem Witch Museum on a rainy day earlier this week, I made sure that a hearty meal at a local luncheonette was part of the deal. We were sitting at a booth when Tim, after watching a table of construction workers all pull out their iPhones simultaneously and start scrolling through their screens, suddenly said, “Mom, you should really have a smartphone.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because everyone else does,” he responded. I suppressed a smile. Isn’t that normally the reason kids his age – twelve – want things for themselves: because everyone else has it? Was I discovering a new phase of child development: peer pressure by transference? Bad enough for a pre-teen not to have what everyone else does: is it even more embarrassing when your mom doesn’t hold the latest purse-sized technology?
“I don’t want a smartphone,” I told him. “I like to be able to walk away from my email. If I had a smartphone right now, I’d be checking my email and writing back to people. I like having to just leave it all behind when we go somewhere together.”
So it was fitting that less than 24 hours after this conversation, I was reading an article about MIT internet expert Sherry Turkle, who in her newest book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, describes her experience conducting interviews with hundreds of teen subjects who complained about their parents’ overuse of mobile technology when they should be paying attention to their kids.
Turkle said that most people who heard that had the same reaction: they expected to hear that parents were complaining about their kids’ reliance on constant access to mobile communication, but what she instead found was the opposite. No matter whether they are toddlers or teens: kids want their parents’ undivided attention. My kids complain when we do errands or go to community events and I spend time chatting with other adults I know. “No chatting, Mom!” they insist time and again.
If I had a smartphone, it would be like chatting, only silently, I fear. My attention would be directed away from them even when we were deliberately choosing to spend time together. Turkle describes the scenarios she sees in which parents’ attention gets divided: a mother pushing a child on the swing with one hand and texting with the other; a father who sends emails during his son’s baseball game. As Turkle points out, it’s a mistake on many levels, and not only because it detracts from one-on-one time between parent and child. It’s also dangerous to let yourself get so distracted, and multitasking tends to lead to a decrease in the quality of whatever it is you are trying to accomplish as you multi-task.
So despite Tim’s comment, I’m glad not to carry my email around with me. I know I’d succumb to the temptation to use it when I shouldn’t, so why put myself in that position? As we ate our sandwiches, I listened to the kids talk about the witch museum, and then we all laughed quietly about a conversation going on at the booth behind us, which reminded us of a similar situation last month in which we heard a funny conversation at the booth behind us while we ate breakfast at a local diner. Tim asked me what kind of job I thought the construction workers who were avidly punching away at their phones as they waited for their lunches were doing on this rainy day, and Holly drew a picture on her paper placemat.
In short, we paid attention: to each other, to our surroundings. I was glad not to have any distractions; when my phone rang I silenced the ringer. My guess is that I won’t hold out forever. Everyone else walks around with their email at their fingertips, and eventually I will too. I just hope I remember that undivided attention should always be a priority: whether it’s on the kids, the driving, or just the sound of the rain against the restaurant’s windows.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because everyone else does,” he responded. I suppressed a smile. Isn’t that normally the reason kids his age – twelve – want things for themselves: because everyone else has it? Was I discovering a new phase of child development: peer pressure by transference? Bad enough for a pre-teen not to have what everyone else does: is it even more embarrassing when your mom doesn’t hold the latest purse-sized technology?
“I don’t want a smartphone,” I told him. “I like to be able to walk away from my email. If I had a smartphone right now, I’d be checking my email and writing back to people. I like having to just leave it all behind when we go somewhere together.”
So it was fitting that less than 24 hours after this conversation, I was reading an article about MIT internet expert Sherry Turkle, who in her newest book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, describes her experience conducting interviews with hundreds of teen subjects who complained about their parents’ overuse of mobile technology when they should be paying attention to their kids.
Turkle said that most people who heard that had the same reaction: they expected to hear that parents were complaining about their kids’ reliance on constant access to mobile communication, but what she instead found was the opposite. No matter whether they are toddlers or teens: kids want their parents’ undivided attention. My kids complain when we do errands or go to community events and I spend time chatting with other adults I know. “No chatting, Mom!” they insist time and again.
If I had a smartphone, it would be like chatting, only silently, I fear. My attention would be directed away from them even when we were deliberately choosing to spend time together. Turkle describes the scenarios she sees in which parents’ attention gets divided: a mother pushing a child on the swing with one hand and texting with the other; a father who sends emails during his son’s baseball game. As Turkle points out, it’s a mistake on many levels, and not only because it detracts from one-on-one time between parent and child. It’s also dangerous to let yourself get so distracted, and multitasking tends to lead to a decrease in the quality of whatever it is you are trying to accomplish as you multi-task.
So despite Tim’s comment, I’m glad not to carry my email around with me. I know I’d succumb to the temptation to use it when I shouldn’t, so why put myself in that position? As we ate our sandwiches, I listened to the kids talk about the witch museum, and then we all laughed quietly about a conversation going on at the booth behind us, which reminded us of a similar situation last month in which we heard a funny conversation at the booth behind us while we ate breakfast at a local diner. Tim asked me what kind of job I thought the construction workers who were avidly punching away at their phones as they waited for their lunches were doing on this rainy day, and Holly drew a picture on her paper placemat.
In short, we paid attention: to each other, to our surroundings. I was glad not to have any distractions; when my phone rang I silenced the ringer. My guess is that I won’t hold out forever. Everyone else walks around with their email at their fingertips, and eventually I will too. I just hope I remember that undivided attention should always be a priority: whether it’s on the kids, the driving, or just the sound of the rain against the restaurant’s windows.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
How unplugged should vacation be?
It was only slightly coincidental that I was flying home from a vacation in Colorado when I read this article from Monday’s New York Times about scientists spending time “unplugged” while debating about whether an actual change in mental facilities occurs when we remove ourselves from the world of connectivity. I say “slightly” because you don’t have to be a professional journalist to recognize there’s a reason this story ran when it did: many Americans, not just me and the scientists in the story, take vacation this month, so the question about the value of separating from technology while on vacation is particularly timely.
Nonetheless, I’d already been thinking about the issue of how far to remove myself from connectivity – email, social media, cell phone calls – throughout the vacation, so it was interesting to be flying home as I read this story, in which some scientists expressed their belief that it makes a huge difference in our powers of focus and mental acuity when we disconnect in this way and other scientists said the difference was incidental.
I’m different from a lot of the people I often read about in regards to this topic in a very simple way: at least by telecommunication standards, I’m not that popular. I don’t receive hundreds of emails a day. My cell phone seldom rings more than once or twice in any twenty-four hour period, and even when it rang during our Colorado vacation, the caller was usually a local friend trying to find out what time I wanted to meet for coffee rather than anyone related to my work. I might like to be one of those typical professionals who acts vexed over the onslaught of calls and messages that are part of the daily fabric, but that’s not really my situation.
Nonetheless, I do appreciate the value of stepping away from the constant contact we have come to expect in everyday life. While in Colorado, I reminded myself that checking email once or twice a day was enough; I didn’t need to distract myself with cyber-discussions about what time the Spaghetti Supper Committee should meet in September. The Twitter feed is always tempting, but I reminded myself that focusing on our vacation plans mattered more while we were away from home than keeping up with constant news updates or pithy observations about the challenges of the writing life. Same with Facebook: I was in Colorado to spend time with my husband and children, and I knew I needed to detach myself from the stream of stories, anecdotes and observations of my friends back home and my high school contacts.
But I wasn’t so sure about the daily newspaper. Should I be keeping up with the Boston Globe online, I wondered? And if so, was it enough to read breaking news, or should I browse through features and editorials as well? Was it okay to say that since I was away from home I could skip the obituaries, or did I dare not take the risk that information I should know would appear in that section during the week?
Phone calls were less of an issue. As I said, my cell phone doesn’t ring that often, and my Globe editors already knew I was on vacation. The only person I really wanted to hear from (given that my parents and sisters aren’t big cell phone users either) was my literary agent with news of a publishing deal, but I hardly expected that call to come through during my eight days in Colorado, and my instincts were right: it didn’t.
Vacation or not, finding ways to routinely detach ourselves from the steady stream of conversation and information that has come to define this era is always a good idea. Earlier this year I heard several interviews with Judith Shulevitz about her new book on keeping the Sabbath, and that inspired me to try to go email-free on Sundays. Though I don’t always stick to it, I try to check email only first thing in the morning and after dinner on Sundays, and stay away from the keyboard the rest of the day.
Moreover, keeping myself off line for hours at a time during our vacation cemented my resolve not to start using a smartphone. I’d been on the fence for a while about whether I wanted that level of mobile communication. Right now I have to be at my computer to check my email, and had been vacillating about whether I’d like the kind of phone that would enable me to carry email access around with me.
Now, I’ve convinced myself that this is not something I want. I don’t like the idea of constantly checking email. It’s not just the issue of distraction: I like surprises. I’m resigned to the fact that opening our “real” post office box is no longer very interesting since hardly anything exciting or unexpected comes by snail-mail, but checking my email after several hours away from my computer can still be a small thrill. With ten or more new messages, who knows what treasures lurk? A chatty note from my college roommate? A compliment on my blog? Word from my agent about finding a publisher? (Nope, not yet.)
I agree with the scientists in the New York Times article who believe concentration is improved when we walk away from our mobile communications. I just have trouble doing it for more than a few hours at a time. But I admit that there was a sense of liberation last week as I hit the hiking trail and discovered I had no signal, or closed my cell phone in a locker before following my kids down the hall to the public pool. Sometimes it’s good to just walk away and concentrate on the life that’s unfolding right in front of you instead of in your various virtual realms. And it’s even more helpful to reconnect afterwards and acknowledge that most likely, you really haven’t missed a thing.
Nonetheless, I’d already been thinking about the issue of how far to remove myself from connectivity – email, social media, cell phone calls – throughout the vacation, so it was interesting to be flying home as I read this story, in which some scientists expressed their belief that it makes a huge difference in our powers of focus and mental acuity when we disconnect in this way and other scientists said the difference was incidental.
I’m different from a lot of the people I often read about in regards to this topic in a very simple way: at least by telecommunication standards, I’m not that popular. I don’t receive hundreds of emails a day. My cell phone seldom rings more than once or twice in any twenty-four hour period, and even when it rang during our Colorado vacation, the caller was usually a local friend trying to find out what time I wanted to meet for coffee rather than anyone related to my work. I might like to be one of those typical professionals who acts vexed over the onslaught of calls and messages that are part of the daily fabric, but that’s not really my situation.
Nonetheless, I do appreciate the value of stepping away from the constant contact we have come to expect in everyday life. While in Colorado, I reminded myself that checking email once or twice a day was enough; I didn’t need to distract myself with cyber-discussions about what time the Spaghetti Supper Committee should meet in September. The Twitter feed is always tempting, but I reminded myself that focusing on our vacation plans mattered more while we were away from home than keeping up with constant news updates or pithy observations about the challenges of the writing life. Same with Facebook: I was in Colorado to spend time with my husband and children, and I knew I needed to detach myself from the stream of stories, anecdotes and observations of my friends back home and my high school contacts.
But I wasn’t so sure about the daily newspaper. Should I be keeping up with the Boston Globe online, I wondered? And if so, was it enough to read breaking news, or should I browse through features and editorials as well? Was it okay to say that since I was away from home I could skip the obituaries, or did I dare not take the risk that information I should know would appear in that section during the week?
Phone calls were less of an issue. As I said, my cell phone doesn’t ring that often, and my Globe editors already knew I was on vacation. The only person I really wanted to hear from (given that my parents and sisters aren’t big cell phone users either) was my literary agent with news of a publishing deal, but I hardly expected that call to come through during my eight days in Colorado, and my instincts were right: it didn’t.
Vacation or not, finding ways to routinely detach ourselves from the steady stream of conversation and information that has come to define this era is always a good idea. Earlier this year I heard several interviews with Judith Shulevitz about her new book on keeping the Sabbath, and that inspired me to try to go email-free on Sundays. Though I don’t always stick to it, I try to check email only first thing in the morning and after dinner on Sundays, and stay away from the keyboard the rest of the day.
Moreover, keeping myself off line for hours at a time during our vacation cemented my resolve not to start using a smartphone. I’d been on the fence for a while about whether I wanted that level of mobile communication. Right now I have to be at my computer to check my email, and had been vacillating about whether I’d like the kind of phone that would enable me to carry email access around with me.
Now, I’ve convinced myself that this is not something I want. I don’t like the idea of constantly checking email. It’s not just the issue of distraction: I like surprises. I’m resigned to the fact that opening our “real” post office box is no longer very interesting since hardly anything exciting or unexpected comes by snail-mail, but checking my email after several hours away from my computer can still be a small thrill. With ten or more new messages, who knows what treasures lurk? A chatty note from my college roommate? A compliment on my blog? Word from my agent about finding a publisher? (Nope, not yet.)
I agree with the scientists in the New York Times article who believe concentration is improved when we walk away from our mobile communications. I just have trouble doing it for more than a few hours at a time. But I admit that there was a sense of liberation last week as I hit the hiking trail and discovered I had no signal, or closed my cell phone in a locker before following my kids down the hall to the public pool. Sometimes it’s good to just walk away and concentrate on the life that’s unfolding right in front of you instead of in your various virtual realms. And it’s even more helpful to reconnect afterwards and acknowledge that most likely, you really haven’t missed a thing.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Kids and technotainment: I deserve a B- (or maybe a C+)
Amy Suardi wrote earlier this month on her Frugal Mama blog about the viability of keeping small children from technology, and the post inspired a lot of interesting comments. Most supported Amy; one (who appears to be a friend of hers) wrote tongue-in-cheek about this: “As the proud owner of a Wii, I enjoy spending time with my kids using “gasp”, technology to bond and have fun with them. I would never feel that it can replace fresh air and sunshine, but it isn’t the devil, either.”
Now that my children are 11 and 7, I think we're far enough into parenting that I can begin assessing how well I succeeded at meeting the ideals I held early in my parenting days about keeping technology at bay. Overall, I think I'd give myself a B-, and that might be a little bit generous. A C+ might be more honest.
Neither of my children was a TV-watcher early on; at about the age of three we started allowing occasional DVDs. A year or two after that, Tim was introduced (I forget exactly how) to children's video games, and after that he acquired a GameBoy. More recently -- in the past year or two -- he developed an interest in specific TV shows like Survivor and American Idol. My daughter, like most younger siblings, experienced all of these things a bit earlier due to her older brother's influence.
Although I still admire the ideal of keeping kids away from screens altogether -- wrapping network programming, DVDs, video games and computer games into one all-encompassing category -- I have to admit I wasn't altogether successful at it. I did manage to avoid regular TV shows until my kids were in grade school, which was a small accomplishment that carried the added benefit of keeping them away from commercials, but Tim adored video games when he was young, and both now enjoy watching the aforementioned TV shows together.
So maybe I'm just rationalizing my own semi-failures, but all in all, I think their exposure as it developed was reasonable and not particularly harmful to them. While I'm no fan of video games, Tim has always played the sports kind and not the violent kind; and while I could surely live without American Idol, I don't find it particularly offensive. The show also gives my two children an interest in common, which being different genders and four years apart in age they haven't always easily found. And in fact, the very first reality show they followed was a teen version of Survivor called Endurance which airs on the Discovery Kids network. We found out about Endurance when I interviewed one of the cast members for a Boston Globe story, so in a way it carried a favorable connection between my writing career and TV. The fact that they eventually got to meet the subject of my story after watching him on TV for two months was particularly satisfying.
I wasn't happy at all about Tim's GameBoy fixation when he was 6, but unrelated to all the restrictions that I tried to place on his usage of it, in time he lost interest in it himself. The valuable lesson I learned from that was that sometimes with kids, their good judgment ultimately prevails even where your own attempts to mold their thinking fail. In retrospect, it definitely wasn't worth my expending so much energy trying to put restrictions on his GameBoy use when his interest in it burned out so fast.
Last December we bought the kids a Wii setup. As the commenter on Frugal Mama says, it's a cooperative activity they can enjoy together, with cousins or with friends. Like American Idol, it's one of the few interests they have in common. Moreover, they don't overdo it. They play it like a board game, taking it out every few weeks on a lazy weekend. They never try to stay up late playing Wii or get a game started when they should be doing homework.
I think the most important thing I've learned in regard to parenting and kids' technology is that it's not an either/or situation. When Tim was first born and I was full of new-parent ideals, I believed that letting a child watch DVDs or play video games meant he or she would never develop an interest in books; that giving them access to American Idol meant they'd never learn to play an instrument. But I was wrong. My kids do both. On a wide-open Saturday, Tim will play computer games part of the day and read at other times of day. With an extra half-hour in the morning before she has to leave for school, Holly might ask to watch the previous night's episode of Endurance or she might play school with imaginary students. They do technology and they have imagination. Even though she could have asked to watch a DVD, Holly spent hours earlier this fall dictating her first novel to me, a 11,000-word opus more comprehensive than anything I wrote at her age.
I do realize most of this is rationalizing. My teenage nieces are two of the most intelligent, well-rounded and capable girls I have ever known, and their lives were TV-free until they were about 10. It's hard to look at them and not argue that this is the right way to go. On the other hand, I see some parents work too hard to keep their kids away from technology. I think it's Judith Warner in Perfect Madness who writes about parents of young children who end up acting like TV sets themselves in their efforts to entertain their children, with a constant stream of story-telling, hypothetical problem-posing, fantasy, invention and other means toward the end of forcing their children's imaginations to stay active.
From the time Tim was eight months old until he was about two, I used to take him out in the jog stroller, and what was most notable for me about those forays was the silence. Before he was born, I was accustomed to running alone, and once he was old enough for the jog stroller, I was delighted to take him with me but had no desire to turn my time of solitude into a period of one-sided chatter. So he and I would cruise the streets of our neighborhood for 30 minutes or more in companionable silence. He never fussed and I never initiated conversation. He just looked around, absorbing the scenery and absorbing the quiet.
He's still someone who likes quiet. Along with video games, computer games and novels.
Now that my children are 11 and 7, I think we're far enough into parenting that I can begin assessing how well I succeeded at meeting the ideals I held early in my parenting days about keeping technology at bay. Overall, I think I'd give myself a B-, and that might be a little bit generous. A C+ might be more honest.
Neither of my children was a TV-watcher early on; at about the age of three we started allowing occasional DVDs. A year or two after that, Tim was introduced (I forget exactly how) to children's video games, and after that he acquired a GameBoy. More recently -- in the past year or two -- he developed an interest in specific TV shows like Survivor and American Idol. My daughter, like most younger siblings, experienced all of these things a bit earlier due to her older brother's influence.
Although I still admire the ideal of keeping kids away from screens altogether -- wrapping network programming, DVDs, video games and computer games into one all-encompassing category -- I have to admit I wasn't altogether successful at it. I did manage to avoid regular TV shows until my kids were in grade school, which was a small accomplishment that carried the added benefit of keeping them away from commercials, but Tim adored video games when he was young, and both now enjoy watching the aforementioned TV shows together.
So maybe I'm just rationalizing my own semi-failures, but all in all, I think their exposure as it developed was reasonable and not particularly harmful to them. While I'm no fan of video games, Tim has always played the sports kind and not the violent kind; and while I could surely live without American Idol, I don't find it particularly offensive. The show also gives my two children an interest in common, which being different genders and four years apart in age they haven't always easily found. And in fact, the very first reality show they followed was a teen version of Survivor called Endurance which airs on the Discovery Kids network. We found out about Endurance when I interviewed one of the cast members for a Boston Globe story, so in a way it carried a favorable connection between my writing career and TV. The fact that they eventually got to meet the subject of my story after watching him on TV for two months was particularly satisfying.
I wasn't happy at all about Tim's GameBoy fixation when he was 6, but unrelated to all the restrictions that I tried to place on his usage of it, in time he lost interest in it himself. The valuable lesson I learned from that was that sometimes with kids, their good judgment ultimately prevails even where your own attempts to mold their thinking fail. In retrospect, it definitely wasn't worth my expending so much energy trying to put restrictions on his GameBoy use when his interest in it burned out so fast.
Last December we bought the kids a Wii setup. As the commenter on Frugal Mama says, it's a cooperative activity they can enjoy together, with cousins or with friends. Like American Idol, it's one of the few interests they have in common. Moreover, they don't overdo it. They play it like a board game, taking it out every few weeks on a lazy weekend. They never try to stay up late playing Wii or get a game started when they should be doing homework.
I think the most important thing I've learned in regard to parenting and kids' technology is that it's not an either/or situation. When Tim was first born and I was full of new-parent ideals, I believed that letting a child watch DVDs or play video games meant he or she would never develop an interest in books; that giving them access to American Idol meant they'd never learn to play an instrument. But I was wrong. My kids do both. On a wide-open Saturday, Tim will play computer games part of the day and read at other times of day. With an extra half-hour in the morning before she has to leave for school, Holly might ask to watch the previous night's episode of Endurance or she might play school with imaginary students. They do technology and they have imagination. Even though she could have asked to watch a DVD, Holly spent hours earlier this fall dictating her first novel to me, a 11,000-word opus more comprehensive than anything I wrote at her age.
I do realize most of this is rationalizing. My teenage nieces are two of the most intelligent, well-rounded and capable girls I have ever known, and their lives were TV-free until they were about 10. It's hard to look at them and not argue that this is the right way to go. On the other hand, I see some parents work too hard to keep their kids away from technology. I think it's Judith Warner in Perfect Madness who writes about parents of young children who end up acting like TV sets themselves in their efforts to entertain their children, with a constant stream of story-telling, hypothetical problem-posing, fantasy, invention and other means toward the end of forcing their children's imaginations to stay active.
From the time Tim was eight months old until he was about two, I used to take him out in the jog stroller, and what was most notable for me about those forays was the silence. Before he was born, I was accustomed to running alone, and once he was old enough for the jog stroller, I was delighted to take him with me but had no desire to turn my time of solitude into a period of one-sided chatter. So he and I would cruise the streets of our neighborhood for 30 minutes or more in companionable silence. He never fussed and I never initiated conversation. He just looked around, absorbing the scenery and absorbing the quiet.
He's still someone who likes quiet. Along with video games, computer games and novels.
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