How Parents Can Fight Back Against the Digital Deluge of Life

Seven tips for parents to disconnect in the digital age.

Intro from Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch:

Katherine Martinko is one of the most thoughtful voices on navigating family life in the age of digital oversaturation. In an era of unregulated addictive social media, gaming, and other digital activities it can sometimes feel like there is little one can do as a parent to reduce the harms of the phone-based childhood. Katherine, however, shows that there is a lot that can be done to push back against the deluge of digital devices and help our children (and ourselves) even before new regulations are enacted or new collective norms are established. 

Katherine is the author of Childhood Unplugged: Practical Advice to Get Kids Off Screens and Find Balance (2023), with a foreword written by Lenore Skenazy. She also spent over a decade as a journalist at Treehugger. Katherine has been raising her three children (ages 9, 13, and 15) without smartphones, social media, or even television. She believes it is her responsibility to provide her children with memories of an independent, play-based childhood full of adventures and in-person social interactions. 

Zach and I enjoy her writing so much that we invited her to join us more formally on the Anxious Generation team as a speaker to schools and parent groups and writer here on After Babel. We’ve already published one of her essays: Modern Luddites: On Being a Digital Minimalist Family in a Tech-Saturated World. You can expect more from her in the coming months. Welcome, Katherine!

– Jon and Zach

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This past summer, I was at my youngest son’s soccer practice, reading a lengthy email, when suddenly my son came sprinting out of nowhere. He tugged the phone out of my hands and tossed it onto the grass. “Mom, get off your phone!” he yelled. “Please watch me!” He was gone as quickly as he’d appeared.

His coach laughed, and I joined in, somewhat sheepishly. My son was right. The email could wait till we got home. What I needed to do at that moment was pay attention, not because I was particularly interested in soccer drills, but because it mattered to him, and it was our first time together that day. 

It wasn’t just about watching him. It was about being alert to his little bids for connection, the frequent times when he looked over to make eye contact or wave or smile at me. He wanted to know I was present, mentally as well as physically. He needed to know that he was more important than my phone. 

That day was a valuable reminder of what our children perceive when we, their parents and guardians, are on our phones in their presence—particularly when it becomes habitual, as it was for me. Phone use often feels justified to us adults. We are busy booking appointments, ordering food, texting grandparents, arranging play dates, tracking fitness goals, or earning much-needed money through a remote job. But a child does not understand that. All they see is the back of a phone, blocking their parent’s face.

This doesn’t mean a parent needs to be attentive to their child every minute of the day. That would be exhausting and unsustainable. Instead, the goal is to be fully engaged in the moments that matter most, and let go the rest of the time, letting the child play independently while the parent does whatever they need to do.

Now, many children are oversupervised, rarely afforded “the luxury of being unnoticed,” as novelist Mona Simpson put it. This can make it hard to tell which moments should “matter” when we’re constantly with our kids. Yet, if we give them space to play independently, they become remarkably adept at entertaining themselves, which is good for them and for us. By removing ourselves from the role of playmate or constant chaperone, our kids find things to do on their own, and we gain time and space for ourselves, which in turn makes it feel less onerous to be fully present when a meaningful moment arises, like my son’s soccer practice. 

When we give our children more independence while also putting our phones down more often, something powerful happens. Children learn that they are trusted, capable, and that there’s nothing more important to us than being present with them. In turn, they see that these devices are not all-important, making it less likely they’ll grow up believing that they, too, need that “magical thing” in their hands.

There are many small yet mighty ways that I have learned to fight back against the digital deluge. In this post, I offer seven tips that have helped me and I hope can help you reclaim your time, your peace of mind, your ability to engage in deep thought, and your sense of presence when engaging with a child. Best of all, you will teach your child that it is possible to have an interesting, meaningful life offline. You can try implementing just one of these tips or, if you feel compelled, all of them. Some may be more applicable to your life, while others are not or may be unrealistic. My hope is for them to feel accessible and doable and not at all overwhelming.

What Parents Can Do

Tip 1. When spending time with a child, leave your phone elsewhere.

You can keep it in a bag, in another room, or in the car. Turn it off, silence it, or set it on focus or airplane mode, so that you have it in case of emergency. You might want to use a customized focus mode that allows calls and texts from certain people, while silencing all other notifications. You could even choose to leave the phone at home when you go out. It is an oddly nerve-wracking feeling, even though many of us did it for years before smartphones existed. I think it’s a good exercise to remind ourselves of how we used to function in the world, before we were so hyperconnected. 

The goal is to create distance between you and the phone so that you are not tempted to look at it as soon as you feel a flicker of boredom. You will also prove to your kid that it’s possible to move through the world without a device in hand. I like how doing this puts the parent on equal footing with a young child, who presumably does not have a phone, either. (If they do, have them leave it elsewhere, too.) Instead of the parent turning away from the child to lose themselves in a device, they are forced to turn toward the child, to lean into a shared moment that will inevitably blossom into something more.

Tip 2. Develop analog habits.

Reject the multipurpose tool that is the smartphone and replace it with things that minimize distraction and maximize interaction, such as cookbooks, pens and paper, calculators, alarm clocks, calendars, physical books, magazines, records, and more. Show your child how things are done in the real world. This is not a call to reject technology outright, but to be aware of when and how technology complicates things unnecessarily.

Tip 3. Embrace the concept of “techno-selectionism,” coined by Cal Newport.

This is the idea that innovations can significantly improve our lives, but that “we can build new things without having to accept every popular invention as inevitable.” In other words, we can test out new technologies and then reject them if they do not serve our interests. Not every technology advancement represents progress, particularly if it undermines certain life skills and your family values.

Tip 4. Implement a weekly digital fast.

Also known as a digital sabbath, this practice involves powering down all electronic devices in a household for a single 24-hour period each week. This creates time and space for offline activities, a slower pace of life, more family connectedness, and a normalization of that unplugged feeling. You can also do a lighter version of a digital sabbath, by choosing, for example, to not check email and social media one day a week (as Zach now does).

An extension of this is to restrict your own phone use to specific hours of the day, e.g., before kids wake up, after they go to bed, or during the workday when they’re at school and won’t see you using the device. If you must use your phone, explain to your child what it is that you’re doing. Try leaving your phone upstairs, downstairs, or in another room as a way of creating friction between the urge to scroll and access to the device. Within that small interval of space, you might choose to do something else.

Tip 5. Delete social media apps.

If you don’t have social media on your phone, you will be less inclined to check it compulsively throughout the day. You can still maintain a social media presence, but make a rule that you will only access your accounts from a computer. I did this with Facebook years ago, and it makes a huge difference. If you don’t want to go that far, keep the apps but turn off all notifications and badges.

Tip 6. Boring-ify your phone.

Some parents who don’t want to get rid of their smartphones altogether have opted to make their phones as unappealing as possible. They use a grayscale filter, scrap the fun background image, and change all apps to plain white boxes with a single capital letter to indicate what they are. 

Tip 7. Don’t roam when you travel.

Whenever I travel out of the country with my kids, I like to turn my phone on airplane mode for the entire trip and only use Wi-Fi. This helps me to be fully present and eliminates the temptation to look at my phone, apart from using downloaded Google Maps and the camera. In an emergency, I could turn my phone on (and incur a high cost, which acts as a disincentive). 

By making a conscious effort to cultivate healthy phone use habits, we set an example for our kids, who learn best by watching us. This may not feel easy or convenient, but it is important, if for no other reason than we want our kids to look back on their childhood someday and know, without a shadow of doubt, that their company was more precious to us than that of our phone.