Modern Luddites: On Being a Digital Minimalist Family in a Tech-Saturated World

Advice from the author of Childhood Unplugged

Introduction from Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch:

Since the publication of The Anxious Generation, we have been seeking out stories from parents who have avoided giving their children phone-based childhoods. How did they do it? How did they find the strength, especially those who did not have any like-minded families nearby? 

A few months ago we started following a superb Substack, The Analog Family, written by Canadian author and journalist Katherine Martinko. 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, 12, and 14) 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.

Katherine started Analog Family in February 2023, the same week that we launched After Babel. We were so busy in 2023 racing the deadline for The Anxious Generation that we didn’t notice her Substack until some people started mentioning our books and Substacks together this past April. Once we began reading Katherine we discovered that our substacks were fraternal twins who were separated at birth and sent to different parts of North America to grow up. You can see the family resemblance in this quote from her opening post, where she laid out her plans for the Substack:

I'm calling it The Analog Family because we are a modern family that strives to have less screen time, more real time. I'm on a mission to reclaim childhood as the rich, formative chapter in life that it's meant to be. I believe this work to be tremendously important, as children need advocates to speak up, to defend what they do not know they're missing out on, to protect their imaginations and curiosity and free play time. It's such a short period of time, but it's disappearing far too quickly. I hope this space can be a place to inspire parents to step back and let their children grow, explore, and develop more boldly.

We are so aligned with Katherine and inspired by her writing that we invited her to share her story and offer advice and encouragement to readers of After Babel. If you like what you read here, we hope you’ll check out her many other essays at The Analog Family and then perhaps make your family more analog too.

— Jon and Zach

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I grew up in a small house on the edge of a remote Canadian lake. There was no TV, no VCR, no video games, no Internet. My three siblings and I spent our time playing outside, reading books, making art, baking, and dreaming of the world beyond the endless forest. My parents had no sympathy for my complaints about the lack of screen-based entertainment. “You’ll be fine,” they said. “This is what we choose. If you want to do things differently when you have your own family, go ahead.” I insisted I would. 

Fast forward 25 years, and that family of my own has materialized. I now have three sons, ages 9, 12, and 14, and—surprise!—they are mostly screen-free. It’s funny how that happens. My mother has yet to say, “I told you so,” but I’m sure we both think it at times. By mostly screen-free, I mean that my kids do not have smartphones, tablets, or a video game console. There is no TV, either. They have limited access to a desktop computer in a common area, and my oldest uses a school-issued laptop to access assignments. They watch movies on Netflix occasionally.

Image. Katherine and her boys

Other than that, they’re living a life that more closely resembles my childhood than that of their peers. They spend their free time practicing flips on the trampoline, doing workouts in our garage gym, and riding their bikes to friends’ houses. They pore over Calvin and Hobbes comics while lying in the hammock and build cardboard mazes for their hamster. Hide-and-seek is a frequent backyard activity. It’s a noisy, chaotic household where solitude is in short supply, and often the house reverberates with the sound of their stampeding feet and roughhousing, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world because I believe they’re having the best possible childhood that I can provide.

I call myself a “digital minimalist” parent, inspired by Cal Newport’s term. I fall into a small yet growing category of parents committed to reducing the amount of time kids spend on devices. I do it because I have concerns about screen time getting in the way of real life. Childhood is a precious, fleeting stage of life, and screens are a portal into a world of ugliness and vapidity that kids don’t need. The frictionless allure of devices obstructs imagination and play opportunities, so it’s easier just not to rely on them at all. 

Plus, it’s a basic math problem. There are limited hours in a day, and every hour spent scrolling on social media or watching YouTube videos takes time away from what I see as more valuable activities, even if it is just sitting alone with one’s thoughts.

Instead, the emphasis in our family is on creative play, physical exploration, and face-to-face interactions. Childhood is seen as a time to develop practical life skills and get plenty of sleep and exercise. It’s a chance to get comfortable with boredom, while learning when and how to focus on important tasks. By the end of it, I hope my sons have a rich repository of childhood memories that will someday make them smile, laugh, and possibly even cringe.

I’m not anti-tech. My entire career as a writer and editor has been enabled by the Internet, and I wouldn’t want to go back to a time without it. But great tools don’t automatically make great toys, and I want my kids to learn the difference. Nor is my goal to shelter them. My kids are not naïve; we talk regularly about fraught, complicated topics that would likely surprise many families.

Being a digital minimalist parent can feel lonely, and there are times when I feel badly that my kids are the ones who get singled out for my unorthodox approach. “Conformity is overrated,” I tell them jokingly, but that is small consolation when you are the only kid going into tenth grade without a smartphone. My oldest son wants a phone badly because everyone else has one, but that’s not a compelling enough reason to buy him one. I stand firm, reiterating that he won’t get one before 16 (and then will have to pay for it himself). This recommendation comes from Dr. Jean Twenge, who puts smartphone ownership on par with having a driver’s license, an analogy I love and cite far more often than my son would like to hear. 

Another rule is no social media before 18, which means that even if my kids buy themselves phones at 16, there won’t be any social media apps on them. The goal is to get them through high school without participating actively in that mess of demoralizing comparison and contrived posturing that is so adept at diminishing quality of life. My kids may feel frustrated by my overprotection in the online world, but that’s preferable to being blamed someday for underprotection. 

To pull children back from the precipice of a phone-based life seems shocking to many, but I feel I have no other choice. My stance is reinforced by news stories about Gen Zers who say they wish their parents had delayed their access to social media because they weren’t yet ready to cope with it, despite begging for it. I’m profoundly influenced by the parents I have met and talked to since the publication of my book, Childhood Unplugged, last summer. Dozens have told me (some very emotionally) that they regret giving their kids phones and iPads when they did, that they fear digital media has “ruined” or “stolen” their child, that if they could go back in time and delay for longer, they would. 

I cannot ignore these stories.

Parenting is always hard, but I do think that we determine what is hard, based on the decisions we make. It is not easy or pleasurable to stave off tech creep in my kids’ lives, especially in a world that is so saturated in it, but I would take explaining to my kids for the umpteenth time why they can’t have Snapchat over dealing with the emotional fallout from chronic cyberbullying any day. Pick your poison, parents. 

It is hard being an authoritative (read: not authoritarian) parent in a society that currently emphasizes the idea of “gentle parenting”, a well-meaning approach whereby a child’s permission seems to be a prerequisite for the outcome of any decision. My love for my children is deep and unconditional, but it is imbued with a strong sense of responsibility for what I must do, even if it means saying no repeatedly, even if it means not being their favorite person. At this point, I know too much. I cannot cite blissful ignorance. I have done the research, written a book. There is no turning back, and I will see this through to the end.

There are logistical challenges inherent to a digital minimalist approach. For instance, my son cannot participate in any classroom activity that involves a QR code, a fact I’ve had to point out to his teachers. Sometimes it’s hard for my kids to find information about group projects or extracurricular activities when social media is used to communicate with students, as opposed to updating a website or sending an email.

I’ve had to accept ambiguity when it comes to my kids’ whereabouts. I do not always know where they are because I cannot track them—and this is perfectly OK. Instead, I trust their ability to handle unexpected situations on their own. I’ve taught them how to talk to strangers, how to call from someone else’s phone, how to exit uncomfortable interactions. This old-fashioned setup forces us to make plans in advance—and stick to them! Sometimes we even have to wait for each other; remember doing that? 

But there is something liberating, even relaxing, about knowing they can navigate the world on their own, as opposed to relying on a device that could break or get stolen, aptly dubbed “the world’s longest umbilical cord.” I believe my kids are safer overall because they don’t have that reliance on a phone, nor are they dangerously distracted, eyes down, headphones on, oblivious to everything that is going on around them. Best of all, they are proud and confident in their own ability to move freely in the world, and I love seeing that.

You Can Do This

No doubt it has always been challenging to swim against the current of one’s times, but I do think my task is harder than what my parents faced back in the ‘90s. Thanks to the Internet and social media, there has been what feels like a flattening, a homogenization, of societal norms. No longer content to be quirky eccentrics doing our own thing in private, we have become hyper-aware of how everyone else does everything in their lives (thank you, Instagram), and it makes being countercultural feel like a deeply rebellious act. 

It helps to find a likeminded community of households that share an aversion to tech takeover in childhood. They do exist! One of the loveliest side-effects of my work has been discovering those kindred spirits. There are more digital minimalist families out there than you may realize; you just don’t hear about them because they are not documenting it on social media. So, keep looking, keep talking, and you will find them.

If you want to embrace digital minimalism, it doesn’t matter where you live. This philosophy transcends geographical boundaries. While researching my book, I interviewed families in dense urban settings (Manhattan, downtown Toronto) and remote, rural regions, and was amazed to learn that each family thought they lived in the perfect place to limit kids’ screen time. City dwellers cited the many resources at their disposal, like athletic facilities, museums, theatres, parks, public transit, etc., while rural families said they couldn’t imagine not having a pond and 40 acres of bush for kids to roam. (Of course, children must be safe, and those in rougher neighborhoods or high-traffic areas may need more assistance from adults to develop indoor alternatives.)

Looking ahead, I believe children will thrive if we teach them the life skills that set them apart from machines. I do not buy the argument that kids need to be exposed to tech from a young age in order to be professionally successful. The technology they use is designed to be intuitive (we all learned to use it later in life), and it won’t be the same in a decade. What matters more is teaching them how to be human—how to have conversations, make eye contact, be attentive and alert, be thoughtful and considerate, feel their emotions keenly, be insatiably curious about the real world. Training for that takes years and starts from birth. There is no time to lose.

Sometimes, in moments of self-righteous indignation, my boys insist that their own future children will be issued smartphones at birth and have unlimited access to video games. I nod and say, “That’s fine. You can do things your own way, once you’re the parent.” They tell me they’re serious, and I say I know. But I also know deep down that, when it comes to that, they will have learned just how special a childhood unmediated by screens can be, and I suspect that they too will want to give their kids a chance to experience that. 

Then I watch them meander outside and feed the little chipmunk they’ve trained to eat out of their hands this summer, and set up their backyard treehouse for an impromptu sleepover, and build an elaborate series of jumps in the driveway for their scooters—and I think, “Someday you’ll understand.”