I just spent a long stretch of time with my fifteen-year-old daughter on vacation and even though she was incredibly excited for the vacation, I think she missed out on a lot of it and we missed out on opportunities to enjoy each other. Why? Her phone.
Maybe some of you with older children can relate. I loosened big boundaries on technology this school year and the results have been lingering heavy on my heart. Just about every moment not busy with activity was spent on TikTok or snap chatting with friends. Even walking to and from events was disrupted by listening to music, rather than taking the time to have a conversation, sink into the beautiful surroundings or simply be alone with her thoughts.
Since that trip I’ve been thinking a lot about solitude and about connection. Connection to ourselves, to the world around us and to other people and the role that technology plays in enhancing or disrupting those connections. My daughter will say that she needs social media because that’s how she stays connected to her friends. I would venture that the quality of the connection found in social media isn’t as deep as if she picked up the phone to call or FaceTime. Shallow connections seem to constitute many of our relationships, just as shallow work constitutes much of our work life. At what cost?
There were times on this vacation that I told my daughter I felt alone and that I missed her and wanted her to be present with me and experience all that we had planned. She tried, but there was the phone, hidden under a jacket to be glanced at every few moments, there in her back pocket to create a soundtrack to her life and glued to her face as we drove hundreds of miles along the east coast. I can preach all I want. I can explain the research. I can ask and beg and plead, but the phone has a tendency to win every time. The dopamine hit is just too strong. I’ve heard it said that these young people are the lost generation. Lost because life happens in the confines of our attention and that attention is deep into the black hole of a screen.
We think we’re being careful with our children’s time and then suddenly here we are drowning, the minute that screen door opens. Many of our kids know that large amounts of screen time isn’t healthy. They feel the anxiety it brings. They feel the life they are missing out on and yet are unable to stop themselves. This isn’t the case for every child. One of my children deletes apps on his phone the minute he realizes they are sucking in his attention, but many of us aren’t so disciplined. As a pre-teen and teenager, I remember wanting the connection to other people, to friends, to tribe. Our kids find that on technology and perhaps that’s not a bad thing. I remember hours and hours on the phone with friends as a young person. Those connections are vital. The difference, I think, is the time on and the time off. We had empty spaces when I was growing up. Empty spaces that we filled with our own thoughts.
One of the consequences of this tendency to be drawn into such technology, as Cal Newport would say, is solitude deprivation. Solitude is simply time immersed in our own thoughts, without being influenced by other people’s thoughts. How might we help our kids balance time connected with a peer group and time in solitude developing one’s own thinking?
In Boldschoolers, we talk about the importance of reflection and recently I had a family ask me for clarification about that idea of reflection. Why is reflection important? Why do we need to make time and space for it? How will it help our kids?
The brain needs time to connect new learning with things we already know. Reflection time can help kids process other people’s ideas into existing frameworks of understanding. Reflection time helps kids find the holes, ask questions, and process new understandings. Your child may interact with you when reflecting and he may not. Reflection time happens when your child’s brain isn’t trying to learn something new, but instead is sitting with what’s already been learned, thinking about it. It’s a quiet space and one benefit of solitude.
Relaxing into solitude can be a retreat for your child into her own imagination, her own wonderings about the world. It’s a place where nothing is expected of her, but instead she’s free to let her mind wander. There’s no obligations, no distractions and no one wants anything from her.
We live in a world where we are constantly bombarded with other people’s thoughts: our friends, our neighbors, our spouse, the news, podcasts, billboards, social media, etc. We spend our days reacting to other people’s information, rather than sinking into our own thoughts and experiences. As I watch my teenage daughter, her understanding of self comes from other people telling her how to feel, how to look, and how to behave, yet these feedback loops only offer limited information. Random strangers with made-up lives are influencing our children in ways that erode self-confidence and undermine self-agency.
We need deep and real connections with others, but we also need solitude to rest our social circuits, to create mental wellbeing and to thrive. Can our kids be comfortable with their own thoughts or do they use social media and music and any other noise and distraction to drown out those thoughts and if so, why?
In our next video, we’ll talk about the importance of a high-quality leisure life and what that might look like for different ages of child.
