What Our Kids Can Teach Us About Technology

I'm only halfway into this On Being podcast of Krista Tippet's interview with Sherry Turkle, but one thing that's gotten me really thinking about my own tech habits is Turkle's recent research on digital communications in the home. While we adults often like to complain about how much those crazy kids are on their phones, it turns out that the people who are most upset about this subject are the kids themselves.

That's right, kids, especially teenagers, are complaining that their parents text too much at dinner, or when they pick them up from school. Turkle's findings are that kids want and need to feel connected to their parents, but that parents are complicit in obstructing that connection with the very devices they blame their kids for abusing.

Turkle has done what, I think, more and more families are doing, that is, defining and protecting what she calls sacred spaces in which phones and computers are not allowed. Her primary example is the dinner table, but she also includes moments of meeting (such as picking up your child from school) or simple things like walks together. One of the greatest gifts we can give our children, she argues, is to sometimes leave our phones at home when we go out with them, thus allowing ourselves to really be with them wherever we go.

We already limit TV/movie watching in our home, and we try to have family dinners sans technology (except maybe Pandora playing softly in the background). Putting the phone down altogether would be difficult even for someone like myself who fancies himself relatively independent of such things.

There's more at stake than a traditional way of life, Turkle claims. Technology runs 24/7, but humans do not. Survival itself -- survival in some way recognizably human -- seems to require that we unplug occasionally and just be present in the moment and the world around us.