But I fully acknowledge that the most confident experts on parenting are those who've never had kids (i.e. I haven't walked in your shoes yet so I'm talking out of my ass).
So, speaking as a non-parent here, but recent-enough teenager (graduated high school in 2009, 26 years old), trying to provide the teenager's perspective, without giving explicit parenting advice:
My wife has worked at a daycare for 10 years, and says that the 4 and 5 year olds she have now, have zero imagination. None. They don't even know how to play with toys.
She says that our 2-year-old is leaps and bounds above them in this area (she gets close to zero screen time).
It's just really sad.
Lots of good stuff on this thread. I'm still digesting, but the above stuck out to me. I have two boys 8 and 4. We limit screens a good bit. Always have. Despite that, my oldest has zero imagination and doesn't really play with toys. My youngest can get lost for HOURS playing on his own with all kinds of toys and things. I really think it just depends on the kid and their personality. I will admit that we did play with my oldest too much, so that may have contributed to it.
I was never one to play that much with toys as a kid (baffled my parents a bit, they said later), and I never had cable at home, didn't play video games in any capacity until I was 11, didn't have real internet access until I was about 13, didn't have my own computer (and therefore pretty private internet usage) until 16, didn't have a cell phone of any kind until 18, and didn't have a smartphone until 20. I don't think technology was why I wasn't playing with toys when I was <10. My "imagination" has always had more of an internal manifestation than external. I was the kid that drew circuit diagrams of my grandpa's attic in kindergarten when other kids would draw rabbits and shit. I hated coloring in elementary school. The only technology I had been exposed to at that time were even-ancient-at-the-time Apple IIs in the computer lab at my elementary school, where we once typed some things that we printed on dot-matrix printers.
Posting to follow this disturbing thread about an important topic. My experience with trying to rein in adolescent boys' tech use is that it is a completely confounding task. My boys have become utterly addicted to their phones and laptops, to the point where, when wifi was unavailable at his Dad's place, one son moved out to a friend's place. Oh, and video games. We found That if we forbade, or even limited, them at home, the kids would never be home, but instead go to other places to play (and I don't know what else is going on in those places). It seems to be their primary means of interaction with friends. And guess what? They bring those fucking game consoles to college. And if your kid doesn't, you can bet one of his roommates will. It is hours upon hours of their daily life energy spent. I believe this really is something new under the sun.
Teenagers are stubborn. Teenagers are very stubborn. I was a stubborn teenager (and now I'm a slightly-less-stubborn adult). You tell them they can't do something they want to do, of course they're going to figure out a way to do it anyway if they really want it that much. They're smart. (This goes back to my other post about resourceful teens finding loopholes in restricted school-issued tablets/laptops.) But their prefrontal cortex isn't 100% developed just yet so abstract reasons (like "It's bad for you") don't mean much to them. They'll understand when they're older, but telling them that probably sounds demeaning to their ears, because teenagers think they know everything already.
And there's way worse than gaming consoles in college.
Do you think there was a point at which you could have put your foot down and headed things off at the pass, so to speak? I ask as a mom of 3 whose oldest is 10. I mean, obviously you've got to let go once they're in college but in hindsight, do you see a point at which you might have changed things by not buying a cell phone or gaming console?
I am not judging at all but I am really shocked at what you wrote (and I see that there is obviously a divorce involved, which complicates things). My immediate reaction is that if my kids were trying to circumvent my rules by relocating to a friends' house, I'd take away their car.
I didn't have a cell phone until 18, but things wouldn't have changed much for me as far as video games go. I almost always bought them with my own money (so used last-generation console and games), which meant very few games until I started working at 14. If I had $20, I could buy one game, and it had to be a really good one that would be worth it. (In fact, in 2013 I sold off a bunch of my old N64 games I bought around that time, and nearly all of them actually *appreciated* in value because I only bought good, still-sought-after-now games. The other games I bought later and was therefore a bit more slapdash about, did not have that result.) Games were what first made me into a "saver." Why would I spend $1 on a candy bar when not buying 20 candy bars meant I could buy a video game that would provide hundreds of hours of value over many years? This also bothered my mom, because she couldn't ever get me to want to buy new clothes, even in high school when I was working. I'd much rather wear last year's clothes and have money leftover (this remains true to my adult life, and has extended with time to include 5-7 year old clothes). I thought it was a waste. But video games "were a waste of money" to her. I got scolded for saving up $350 to buy a Wii and two games when it came out in 2006, but if I had blown $50/mo on clothes over the previous seven months, she would have been happy with that. Parents tend to have different values than their teenagers. You can't force them.
I enjoyed this article: http://project-based-homeschooling.com/camp-creek-blog/sliver-or-how-stop-fighting-about-screen-time
tl;dr:
"Many parents approach the subject of screen time — or other kid activities they don’t like, like reading comic books — by placing a strong limit on it. They say to their child, “We want our lives to be lovely and full of all the good things, so we are cramming all the stuff you love that we don’t like into this sliver.”
"Then the parents get to experience the ever-burgeoning frustration of having their child riveted on that sliver of time. The kids want to talk about it. They want to bargain for more of it. They want to argue about whether they got their fair share of it. Why? Because the sliver is where all the good stuff is.
What we need to do is flip it around."
"We say, “We want our lives to be lovely and full of all the good things, so we are going to allot a portion of our day to the stuff that really matters — the stuff we think is important.”"
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Read it, she makes some good points. Then again, this coming from a mom of 4 boys, the oldest of whom is only 5, so definitely not judging here, those with older kids probably know a lot more about this than me.
So I tried her idea out yesterday. I got some super fun entertaining things that I approve of and that I know my kids would find interesting (blocks of lumber of different sizes). Instead of competing with the screens, like screens=bad, free play=good, I just left them strewn about.
They've been playing with those blocks constantly. They still watch tv and play with their tablet, but they independently choose to do this other activity. Not because I said they must, but because it is also good in its own right.
So (again, take with a grain of salt, I am not dealing with teens here), maybe the takeaway is that make your life fun enough that kids WANT to be a part of it?
I really like this idea. Now that I think of it, this sort of thing was always the best way to "get me away from the video games/computer/whatever." Make me actively want to do something else, and I will. They would also praise and encourage me when they saw me doing something they wanted me to do more of (whether it was playing the piano, or checking out 30 dinosaur books at a time from the library in third grade and reading them nonstop).
Again, not speaking as a parent, but just trying to provide the recentish-teenager perspective on some things, and mentioning my own interaction with technology, and what "worked" or didn't with me.
My main personal frustration with "Kids These Days" and technology is that they know their ways around tablets and smartphones, but the median computer skill level seems to be on the decline. I work in IT at a service lab, and we can no longer count on 22-year-old new hires to always be "very tech-savvy." It seems like the demographic with the highest median computer-savviness-level right now is ages 25-45.
