“It’s weird when you have to text your kids to come to the dinner table,” Susan Maushart says. At the end of 2008, she was anxious about the amount of time her three teenagers spent transfixed by technology.
All she usually saw of her 15-year-old son, Bill, was the back of his head as he played on his games console. Her elder daughter, Anni, 18, binged on social-networking sites and 14-year-old Sussy seemed physically attached to her laptop, often staying logged on to the Internet through the night. Over a period of months, Maushart, a single mother, had a “dawning awareness” that something was not right. But when she watched Sussy receive video clips of her friends streamed live over the Internet, her worries became “profound panic.”
“My concern,” she says, “was that we had ceased to function as a family. We were just a collection of individuals who were very connected outwards — to friends, business, school and sources of entertainment and information. But we simply weren’t connecting with one another in real space and time in any sort of authentic way.”
Photo: Bloomberg
Maushart, now 52, decided to take action. She initiated what she describes as an “experiment in living” and banned all technology at home for six months. Her family was to discover life without computers, the Internet, games consoles, TV or mobile phones (although, kowtowing to the realities of the modern world, her teenagers were able to access screens at their friends’ houses and in school). They were to be abruptly weaned off minute-by-minute Facebook status updates about their latest bad hair day.
Expecting rebellion, Maushart offered her kids cash bribes to submit to her plan. But, to her surprise, her offspring were compliant. She readily admits to a penchant for “harebrained schemes,” it turns out that they didn’t really believe her at first.
Initially, the main objections came from other parents. Maushart says that most of her children’s friends’ parents seemed to believe that Anni, Bill and Sussy would become either “social outcasts or idiots.” Upon receipt of Maushart’s out-of-office e-mail stating that she was no longer online, many of them assumed that she’d had a nervous breakdown. She puts this unexpectedly “wild” reaction down to a feeling of tacit judgment: “It made them uncomfortable because it made them question the choices that they were making.”
Maushart had high expectations of her experiment: “I hoped that it would transform our lives — that we would become a closer family, read more, sit around the table to eat and play more music ... that we would feel closer to one another.” She laughs wryly when saying this. And yet, to her delight, many of these expectations were met. Once they realized that their mother was serious, her children adapted well to an offline world.
During their half-year of technological deprivation, the family did eat together more regularly. They talked more. They played board games. They went on outings to the cinema and restaurants. Anni took to studying in the university library. She cooked lasagna. Bill rediscovered his saxophone and got into reading novels by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Sussy, as the youngest and most technologically literate (she and her big sister agree that she’s of the “i-generation” and that Anni isn’t), struggled more. To her mother’s dismay, she moved to her dad’s house for the first six weeks. Eventually, however, she succumbed to the idea of a night not lit up by the glow of the computer and found her erratic sleep patterns eradicated.
Anni, Bill and Sussy confronted boredom — something that they were previously unfamiliar with because of their endless access to online entertainment. They found out that it made them resourceful. Indeed, their mother thinks boredom is fundamentally important in terms of creativity: “If nothing’s wrong, you’re never motivated to change, to move out of that comfort zone.”
She also believes that modern teenagers are more accustomed to it than they realize. “Today, kids are often low-level stimulated when they’re online,” she says. “It’s kind of like running a low-grade fever. I draw the parallel to never really being hungry either. They snack so much that they’re not ready for a proper meal. That lack of boundaries, that ‘blobbiness’ ... it’s not a good way to live.”
Maushart realized how much better she fared if information was not hurled at her en masse. When she went to the cinema during her experiment, she says she “milked every second” of the film, adding: “It just doesn’t happen like that if you’re installed in front of a TV screen with narratives coming at you constantly.” For this reason, she laments that teens today “have lost touch with what it’s like to do one thing at a time.”
Maushart’s extreme action was not just personally motivated. With a PhD in media ecology, she had a secondary, academic interest in how the family would react and was well aware of the cultural context. She felt that they hadn’t chosen the life that they’d been living: It had crept up on them and was symptomatic of the times. As her children were growing up, technological advances had gathered pace, with “some new gadget or extension of the Internet” coming along every few months. Of parents of teenagers today, she says: “We’ve been gulping and gasping for breath just to keep pace with stuff — so we haven’t had the luxury of an arm’s length view.”
Moreover, she says, her generation of parents is particularly “wimpy,” and finds it hard to be seen as authority figures: “We want to give our kids everything. And everything these days includes all the gadgetry and the 24/7 Internet access.”
In the face of this “burden of constant connectivity,” Maushart was inspired by Henry Thoreau’s Walden. She reread the 19th-century American naturalist text about the author’s time spent living in a hut in the woods at a “critical moment” in her dissatisfaction with family life. She felt that he was talking directly to her. “I love his message of living simply, authentically and, perhaps above all, living deliberately — making choices consciously about the way you’re going to live your life, not having life live you,” she says.
Soon Maushart was facing up to her own life choices. A native New Yorker, she followed love and found herself in Perth, Western Australia, at the end of her studies. After her second divorce, she remained there, largely because of the proximity of her children’s father and her journalistic career. During her two decades in the “world’s most isolated city,” she repeatedly told people that she couldn’t live there if it wasn’t for the Internet. While separated from her iPhone, the online version of the New York Times and e-mails to family and friends in the US, she had an epiphany: “The penny dropped that this was just stupid ... that you’ve got to get your head and your body in the same damn place.” Last month, Maushart and her family moved to Long Island, New York.
The move hasn’t meant her family remain app free, however. In terms of their technological habits, the aftermath of the experiment is not one of Thoreau-inspired idealism. “To be completely honest,” she says, “there are days when I think nothing has actually changed — except that we had this wonderful period, this six months where we were living a different kind of life.”
However, despite these bad days, she insists that there have been permanent changes. Because they’d come to understand how it was interfering with their social life, her older two teenagers have both taken holidays from Facebook, albeit not permanent ones. Bill sold his gaming console to buy a new saxophone and Anni still prefers to study in the library, in a social networking-free zone. Sussy doesn’t surf and chat online through the night, but this is more through maternal enforcement than volition.
To other parents, Maushart says not to be afraid to set boundaries — “even if it’s only pulling the plug out of the wall before you go to bed.” The adaptability of teenagers, in her opinion, should not be underestimated. Her children have all expressed a willingness to go offline again. It is something she too would love to do. “I’d look forward to a technology vacation,” she says, “just like I look forward to going on a yoga retreat. I see it as an intermittent thing that straightens your head out, not a way of life.”
The Winter of Our Disconnect by Susan Maushart is published by Profile.
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