Navigating our age..

Love this illustration, for me it sums up the zeitgeist of our time very well. Both my teenage children spend (IMO) an inordinate amount of time looking at their phones, in fact the phone has become the go to device for almost every single interaction with the world that they have to the extent that I often get a text from my Daughter from upstairs asking "what's for dinner"! Is this something we should worry about? Well, I think parents, like politicians instinctively fear change but, like many people today, I worry about where the boundary lies between productive use of technology and abuse/addiction, if indeed there is a line? I had a long Dad-Son chat with my 19 year old the other day on this topic and although we started with different view points, after a while it became clear that he was just as concerned about it as I was and we did in the end find lots of common ground. 

Our (optimistic) conclusion was that digital devices are here to stay, they can't be un-invented and probably shouldn't be anyway, however, parents will never "reason" their way to persuading teenagers to spend less time on them, the best way to do that would seem to be to offer more attractive experiences. Teens are also Humans (obviously!), and at the end of the day we are a social species! When you think about it middle-aged parents (like me) are also insular in many ways too, for example we spend a lot of time on work and hobbies, we tend to socialise exclusively within our peer group and we're probably a little anti-social at times as well (especially when there's a good bottle of red involved!) Part of the solution here (I think) is to try to work out how to involve everyone in whatever is being done rather than allowing people to channelize themselves around their own parochial interests. So, for example (spoiler alert, not my idea!), eat together a few times a week and make a concerted effort to talk to each other! 

We got into the habit a few years ago, when the kids were younger, of putting the TV on while eating meals, pretty soon it became a habit and guess what, conversation dried up! The strange thing is that it became an "elephant in the room" kind of thing (especially when Blue Planet was on!) i.e. everyone recognized the downsides but no one wanted to take positive action to change for fear of upsetting the apple-cart. We now have a little rule in the house, at least 4 nights a week we eat together, no TV, and we start each meal by going around the table with each person having to say one thing that day that they've enjoyed or succeeded at and one thing they haven't. It sounds like some horrendous social-engineering project but surprisingly it nucleates really enlightening and interesting conversations that sometimes outlast the meal itself! Everyone wins. Of course, some nights we just stick the telly on and veg-out over a Chinese take-away but hey ho that can be enjoyable sometimes too!