Creating a life that's worth putting your phone down for
Lessons from parenting applied to adult life.
Hey you,
I want to talk today about that gnarly topic of the effect of screens on modern life and the way we live, work and create today.
I have been chatting a lot about this recently with my good pal
and she is going to be diving into the topic too over the next couple of weeks, so why not check her out if you’re not subscribed to her already?Let’s start this opinion piece with a story involving my teenager. Like most parents, my husband and I seemed to be in a constant battle with our son about his use of screens; what he was using them for and how long.
We’ve had so many different sets of rules and boundaries but enforcing them and monitoring them were so exhausting. There were ongoing arguments, so many discussions and also for me, so much internal dialogue about my anxieties of raising a kid who, despite our best intentions, seemed to be in danger of growing up to be a person with no real interests and passions.
It was also very clear that too much screen time vastly affected his ability to be calm, kind and pleasant to be around and that this behaviour was making everyone unhappy including himself, because he didn’t want the negative side effects either. But he also seemed to want to spend as much time as possible online despite this. Frustrating!
During one less heated conversation, where I tried to have a more curious discussion about his behaviours and attitudes to his screen use, the answer revealed itself; he seemed to have completely lost the ability to engage in other activities or to plan other things to do. he just didn’t seem to see anything else as fun anymore. The easy entertainment and numb-ability of TV and games seemed to have blotted everything else out.
We talked about things that he used to enjoy doing (and still did just to a lesser extent, such as reading, cooking, birdwatching, playing boardgames and running) and we decided to try something new.