Growing up in the 90s, a highlight of the week was Friday pizza nights when we’d eat in the living room and watch TGIF. Looking back, the shows were terrible. But it didn’t matter to us then. My mom gave us the gift of a low-tech childhood. Cable TV wasn’t available at our house just outside the suburbs, and satellite television was much too expensive. Television was limited to whatever the antenna was able to pick up. Most of the time, we were able to get the major networks and PBS, but on stormy days, some of those didn’t work. Those Friday nights were special because it was a novelty. We were fine if we missed it, but when we got to have our pizza night, it was a fun treat.
Instead of spending a lot of time in front of the television, we did what kids were (and are) supposed to do: we played. We mostly played outside, which was easy since we lived on over six acres. We had the room to roam and create. A big family lived next to us for most of my childhood, and they’re in a lot of my memories running around the yard with us. We played hide and seek, ghost in the graveyard, and a slew of games we made up. When winter brought snow, we’d stay outside almost from sunup to sundown. We’d take breaks for lunch and snacks and to put on dry clothes, but besides that, we lived outside on those days. Summer wasn’t much different. There was an in-ground pool at the neighbor’s house on the far side of us, and, for a season, we had an above-ground pool. We’d play until our skin was burnt because we didn’t pause to reapply sunscreen, our eyes burned from the chlorine, and our feet and hands were wrinkled. It was perfect.
If I wasn’t playing, I was reading. Reading was always a sort of play for me, though. I escaped from this world to another where I played in stories that weren’t my own but were helpful as I learned about meaning and truth. I entered the world of Mary Lennox and played with her in her garden. Or I played with Ramona, who was always getting in trouble even though she didn’t want to. I played with the High Queens and Kings of Narnia and Caddie Woodlawn and Laura Ingalls Wilder and countless others who were children just like me and nothing at all like me.
This childhood of play, invention, and books is one of the things from my life that I most wanted to give to my children. My husband and I have never had much worldly wealth, but if I could give them the space to do the timeless work of a child, I’d be a happy mother.
My oldest, now an adult at the age of nineteen, had what I think was an idyllic childhood. He was the king of play as the oldest child, with several siblings close enough in age to be his peers. They were a band of explorers who went on many adventures together. I homeschooled all of them, so they spent a lot of time together doing what kids should do.
They dug a hole for several weeks just because they wanted to. That hole was everything and anything they wanted it to be. It was the refuge for a band of shipwrecked pirates. It was prison for bad guys. It was an acorn juice factory. (This activity was played for years and years thanks to the abundant harvest of acorns from our oak trees. Acorn juice is actually quite disgusting and not fit for human consumption. Don’t ask me how I know.) It was a golf ball cleaning store. They dug and dug and played and played. They’d come inside, tired from a hard day’s work, content with what they had accomplished. “Mama! We think we dug so deep we found oil!” “Mama, can you really dig to China? We might make it!”
They also played with Legos for hours on end. I began to refer to the den downstairs as the Lego room because the floor was always covered with building blocks in various stages of construction. They built cities and empires and circuses and shopping centers. They developed a system of currency for Lego play. They traded Lego men heads and bodies for wheels and other coveted pieces. My oldest played with Legos until he was sixteen. My next oldest is still playing with her little sisters, even though she’s seventeen.
Another favorite activity was race car driving. Oh, hours were spent at the track predicting who would win and break the world record. The track was in our living room, and the race cars could fit in your hand, but that didn’t stop notebooks from being filled up with race results and winner declarations. Sometimes I think my oldest rigged the races in his favor to keep his little sisters from winning, but that is part of being an older brother.
I don’t know if more time was spent doing anything than playing outside. The kids spent countless hours bouncing around from one thing to the next, coming up with wild ideas as kids are prone to do. They’d make bike city, designating who was the bike police. When one child was upset to have been arrested, the bickering would morph into a game of tag which would end up at the tree swing where they’d decide to do the spin of death on someone by winding up the swing as much as they could and then letting go so they’d, well, spin to death. (No child has ever actually died in the Spin of Death, though I doubt my ability to survive it if I were subjected to such torture.)
When I became a mom nineteen years ago, smartphones didn’t exist. Cartoons were still limited to designated times when they were broadcast on television or to a DVD and its player. The most advanced baby monitor technology that existed looked like a walkie-talkie. It could travel with you across your home so you could hear the baby waking up, regardless of what room you were in. International phone calls were still expensive and had poor sound quality.
By the time my toddler was born two years ago, it was rare for me to see a child in a restaurant who wasn’t watching a cartoon on his own tablet. Instead of the clunky audio-only monitors, technology has advanced to offer a video feed for you to watch from your smartphone anywhere in the world where you have internet. The world was in your pocket when my youngest was born, and you could connect with people from every corner of the planet at any time of day through text, email, social media platforms, and video calls.
One of the most curious things about raising two boys seventeen years apart is the divide I feel in their digital generations. My baby was born in a generation where some of his peers—yes, his toddler peers—already have tablets and smart watches. I wonder how much longer it will be before a peer of his has a phone.
I see children at church and the doctor’s office and at siblings’ athletic practices fixated on a screen, and I hurt. They’re so disconnected from this world, from the human practice of being bored and being ok with it, but they don’t even realize this. Will they be able to hold a conversation with adults when they’re older? Can they now?
As much as I hate the changes, my life reflects my embrace of them. I used to know all the staff at our local grocery store. Now I order online and have it delivered to my house. The groceries are left on the front stairs while we’re inside behind a closed door, waiting for the person to leave so we don’t have to interact with them. My kids have forgotten the days of going through the bank drive-up window where the nice person behind the glass would whisper-ask me if the children could have a lollipop. Now I take a picture of any checks I have and deposit them from my bedroom.
But I do try to fight the full onslaught of the smartphone era. I quit social media in 2011 before it was the cool thing to do. I haven’t been on since. I try to limit my screen time and invest my free moments in something more worthwhile—actual connections with people, walking, reading, and embroidery.
A little before his sixteenth birthday, our oldest got a phone. It was not a smartphone, though. He could text and call on it, and that was it. I was glad he had it when he got his driver’s license a few weeks later and could communicate if he was running late or was lost or had an emergency. When he turned seventeen, we upgraded him to a phone that had GPS, an AM/FM radio, a camera, and a calculator. He was eighteen before we gave him a smartphone. He had never asked for one before then, but likely only because he knew the answer would be no. I warned him about the addictive effects of mobile devices, of constant connectivity. Now that he’s nineteen and headed to college, I’ve offered to pay his phone bill until graduation if he uses certain measures to try to protect his mind and heart. It’s not a perfect system, and I know he could access evil in other ways, but as his mother, I have to do something. I remind him occasionally that his brain will not be fully developed until he’s twenty-five and that he has to protect it. I see young people with glazed-over eyes, unaware of what’s happening around them, and fear wells up inside me so much that I want to snatch away my son’s phone and smash it. I can’t, so I’m trying the best I can.
Which brings me to my baby. I’m trying the best I can for him, too. I desperately want him to have that idyllic childhood of digging holes just because he can and Lego-play for hours. I want him to come up with his own version of the spin of death and race car driving, with all the statistics. I want to find funny homemade newspapers that he will make, like his siblings used to leave all over the house, with headlines that incriminate their mother for dropping eggs and ruining lunch. I want him to know life without a dependence on technology and have the time and space to play and read and develop hobbies and interests.
Is it possible anymore to give a child this low-tech childhood? Can I do it when he doesn’t have built-in playmates like his band of siblings did?
I’m going to try.
My fourteen-year-old daughter says that no one follows through with their phone rules all the way to their youngest child. Her lack of belief in me is helpful as I resolve to be impervious for the good and protection of all of my children who are not yet adults. I laugh at my daughter and pat her cheek as I tell her again that I’m more and more committed to not giving my children a smartphone before they turn eighteen.
It will be harder now than it was for my older children. My daughter asks if every other kid truly has a smartphone when my baby turns twelve or ten or eight, will he get one too? “Surely, you won’t let him be the only one without one, then,” she says.
And I respond, “If all of his friends are jumping off a bridge at twelve or ten or eight, should I let him too? Or what if they’re not jumping off a bridge, they’re just watching videos of people jumping off bridges? Does he really need to be a part of that?”
Why do we readily accept that teens and even younger children have smartphones? Why do we set up our lives—and theirs—in a way that makes it hard for families to opt out? For example, I sent my seventeen-year-old to a Christian camp last week, and she was told to join a GroupMe text so she would receive camp communication about last-minute schedule changes and updates. I understand that may be the most efficient way to communicate to a large group, but is efficiency worth giving our children phones when their souls are at stake? There were girls as young as thirteen at the camp. We already know it’s not healthy for all of them to have a phone. Or take my teens’ gym membership: they have to have an app to check in. We’ve found a workaround for my teen girls since neither of them have a smartphone (and the younger one doesn’t have a phone at all), but it’s not always easy. What if we stopped adopting tech and apps that almost make it seem crazy for our teens to be without?
I appreciate that many school systems are restricting phone use during school hours. But we can do more. Employers, extra-curricular activities, churches, and families can set up their systems and events so that phones are not needed and, even better, not allowed.
I have never bought the argument that children need to be exposed to technology so they can learn how to use it. As soon as a child is given the opportunity, they become masters of devices. We are not holding them back from a career in coding or IT by delaying exposure. If anything, we are saving their attention, curiosity, and imaginations—all skills that will help them in any future career—when we provide them with a low-tech childhood.
I used to think that perhaps my husband and I should give my children smartphones while they were still in high school so they could learn to use them responsibly. I realized this was silly when I saw so few of their peers caring about what role technology had in their lives. I hope that by not giving them phones, my children will hear me telling them that devices are something to control, not something to be controlled by. I want them to have as much time as possible developing hobbies and interests away from tech, so when they do have a phone, a tablet, or a laptop, hopefully they will continue spending time offline and with the embodied people around them.
I’m also fine with my children missing out a little because they don’t have a phone. First of all, because there are plenty of things their peers may do that I don’t want them to participate in. My prayer is that by not having a phone now, they may be a little more comfortable later when they need to say no in the face of peer pressure, and I’m not the one making the decision for them. But also, most of what they’re missing out on by not having a phone is worth missing. They’re able to communicate with their friends in other ways (or with my help). That means the only thing they’re missing out on is constantly being digitally connected and accessing to content that likely isn’t beneficial to them.
There are very few children who, given the option, would turn down junk food for healthy food. My children will choose junk every day of the week, even though they know it makes them feel worse. Two of my children even vomit when they have a movie theater snack as simple as soda, candy, and a serving of buttery popcorn, and yet they still choose it, knowing they’re going to regret it. Why do we think that children and teens will practice self-control regularly with their phones and tablets when these devices are designed to make our children come crawling back even when they feel sick from their usage?
According to a poll, nearly half of Gen Z wishes that many social media platforms were never created. If we’re honest, I think most parents of younger children and teens would say they wish they could parent without today’s technology. As a parent of children born before and after the invention of the smartphone, I do too. And because of that, I’m going to parent as if my kids’ souls depended on it and not give in to societal expectations. I may have children on either side of technological history, but their childhoods don’t have to demonstrate that. Instead, I’m going to do everything I can to give my children—all of them, even the toddler—a childhood that is full of play, stories, and real people who love them.
Image Credit: Amélie Lundahl, “Boys by the Shore” (1881) via picryl.
