As an aging Boomer, I remember very clearly a world not dominated by screens: Computer screens, tablet screens, television screens, smartphone screens. We had television screens, but our lives (well, for most of us) didn't revolve around what my Old Man called the "idiot box."
That's all changed. Our interconnected, online lifestyle now has given us huge benefits, not the least of which is the alternative news media, which you are reading at this very moment. It has revolutionized business, shopping, news, socializing... Everything.
That hasn't been without drawbacks. Kids in particular are too often seen to be glued to screens. Some schools are enforcing no-screens policies, but that's only part of the problem. The American Enterprise Institute's Samuel J. Abrams has some thoughts on that.
Districts across the country have pulled smartphones out of students’ hands during the school day, and the early results are encouraging—calmer rooms, steadier attention, and more conversation.
The classroom was the easy part. Summer break is the real test.
For nine months, schools supplied the structure. Now that all falls away and the phone, newly evicted from the classroom, is waiting at home—and a long, unstructured summer is exactly the vacuum it was designed to fill.
If children spend the school year free from their phones only to spend the summer glued to screens, we will not have solved the problem. We will merely have moved it.
Ay, that's the rub.
For us Boomers - for everyone that grew up in the pre-screen world - summer was a magical time. In those long-ago days in Allamakee County, Iowa, my friends and I passed the summers in a whirlwind of activity. We roamed the hills, exploring the hardwood timber, the meadows, the creek bottoms. We fished, we camped, we wandered, a lot of the time with no supervision. And kids across the fruited plain, from Florida to California, from Minnesota to Texas, did much the same. Summers were time to be outside, and by the time school started in the fall the pale kids of spring had been replaced by leaner, suntanned specimens.
No screens required.
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That Great Family Vacation May Not Be As Great As You Think
For generations, summer was one of America’s great engines of growing up. Children went to camp, played ball, worked their first jobs, joined scout troops, showed up at houses of worship, volunteered, roamed their neighborhoods, and spent long days outdoors with friends. These were not just ways to pass the time. They built independence, responsibility, resilience, and confidence.
Many still do. But they now compete with devices engineered to capture a child’s attention and hold it without end.
Consider the child dropped at sleepaway camp, homesick on the second night and certain she will not last the week. Two weeks later, she is sunburned and reluctant to go home, having discovered she is more capable than she knew. No app taught her that. A cabin of bunkmates, a counselor who would not let her quit, and a cold lake at six in the morning did.
It was like a training camp in many ways, or so I'm told; I never went to a sleepaway camp, because there would have been little point for a rural kid to spend time in a rural setting; we already did that daily.
And we shouldn't downplay the jobs angle, either. It seems these days that very few teenagers have jobs, but not all that long ago we worked throughout our teen years. I started in at 14 or so, walking beans, haying, detassling corn. In the summers I did farm work. In the winters, I ran a trapline. When I turned 16, I got a job in town, selling hunting and fishing gear at the Woolco department store in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
That's what kids did. It made us stronger, mentally and physically. Kids these days seem to be missing a lot of that. And when I see some of the pasty, pudgy specimens in airports and grocery stores today, it seems like some of these kids could sure as heck use some more time in the sunshine.
Mr. Abrams concludes:
A phone-free classroom is a good start. But the larger task is not merely distraction control. It is formation. And summer—at camp, on teams, at pools, in libraries, in churches and synagogues, in first jobs and long afternoons with friends—remains one of the best institutions of formation we have. We should use it.
We should. And this is something that, for the most part, government can't really do. Parents need to do this. Have you young children? Institute phone-free family events. Go camping. Go fishing. Yes, teach your kids to shoot; it's great for hand-eye coordination in addition to inculcating them with a sense of responsibility. If you live in a city, take them to a park, if you have one nearby that isn't home to a massive homeless encampment or an open-air drug bazaar.
Get those kids outside. Get them active. That's the single best thing a parent can do. Summertime is a magical time, for kids, for young adults, for everyone.
Make the most of it. You - and your kids.
This seems appropriate.
