Friends:
A mid-summer greeting: after months of intense work, Jon Haidt and I are finished with the manuscript for our upcoming book (The Amazing Generation: Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a World Filled With Screens) and I am GOING ON VACATION.
I’ve got my Brick,* I’ve turned on an email auto-responder, and I’m out of the office (or, rather, I’m away from my dining room table, which is where I’ve been doing most of my work for past few weeks). But before I truly check out, I want to share an interview with you with a friend and colleague of mine (and fellow author and Substacker!),
.Katherine and I first met several years ago when she asked me to blurb her book, Childhood Unplugged, and—after quickly falling in love with the book—I realized that we share more than just a first name: She and her husband are committed to raising their kids (they have three sons) with an abundance of real-world experiences and opportunities for free play—and a minimum of screens.
When you take away the screens, you are opening your child to the world.
—Katherine Martinko
Sometime last fall Katherine joined me for a conversation about phone time, play time, technology, boredom, and hamsters (yes, hamsters) and I’m thrilled to finally be sharing it with you.
I highly recommend checking out Katherine’s book and subscribing to her Substack, The Analog Family—which has thoughtful essays and practical advice for everyone, not just parents.
So take a listen (maybe on your own vacation!)—and I’ll include some practical takeaways from our conversation below. . . .
And here’s Katherine’s excellent Substack:
To scrolling less, living more, and unplugging for ourselves once in a while,
Catherine
PS: If you’re curious about the Brick (which I wrote about in more detail in this post), use SCREENLIFEBALANCE10 to get 10% off. It lets you turn your smartphone into a “dumb” phone on command, and it has saved me from myself more times than I can count.
Pro Tips and Insights from Katherine Martinko:
If you want to reduce conflict around screen time—and help your kids feel less left out if they don’t have smartphones and devices—make your own home a more fun place to spend time in. Katherine and her husband have stocked their (rural Canadian) yard with a used trampoline, a slack line, pogo sticks and more. (Craigslist or your neighborhood listserv or Buy Nothing Facebook group can be great sources of used equipment.) Other ideas: give your kids a board game budget (or set them loose in a thrift store) and if you have the space, allow them to turn an area of the basement, attic, or yard into their own hangout spot. The more fun your home is—and the more independence your kids have there—the less time they’ll want to spend on screens (and the more their friends will want to come over!).
She has a great equation that sums this up: Kids - Digital Media + Independence = Creative Free Play. Take away digital distractions, allow boredom to enter, give kids some independence (and supplies), and before long, you’ve got creative free play.
She and her husband don’t have a television, and the kids don’t have smartphones or tablets. Instead, they have a family desktop computer that they keep in a common area of the house, which their sons use to look stuff up and group text with their friends. (As a side note, this is a common workaround that I’ve heard from people whose kids don’t have smartphones or tablets, but who want to be able to message their friends.) Her boys borrow her or her husband’s phone to make calls, and they watch movies on the family laptop.
They’ve told their oldest son that he can have a smartphone when he turns 16 (their logic being that if you’re not old enough to drive a car, you’re not old enough to own a smartphone)—but if he decides to get one, he will have to buy it and pay for it himself. (This makes so much sense to me!) They also don’t plan to let their sons open social media accounts till they’re at least 18.
She encourages uptight parents like me to “embrace the mess and the chaos” around the house that comes with kids. Why? Because in her words, “they need to see the detritus of their play left all around the house because it's gonna spark their creativity again the next time they see it.”
She encourages parents to help their kids (especially young ones) create screen-free “survival kits” for themselves when they know they’re going to be going on a long plane or car ride — for example, craft supplies, markers and paper, and books. My own husband and I have done this ourselves since our daughter was a baby — we called it our “go bag” — and it’s a tradition we’ve kept up to this day. (My daughter is currently sitting next to me on the plane, trying to crochet . . . and rebuffing all offers of help.)
Lastly, and I don’t even know if I should include this lest it come back to (literally) bite me: Katherine is also a hamster evangelist (hamstevangelist?). She and her husband got one for her boys and referred to it as “the best $25 [she’d] ever spent” (and those are Canadian dollars!). I tried to get her to stop talking about hamsters (because my own daughter is pushing hard) but she refused and just kept telling me about how much creativity and fun their hamsters had brought them. And you know what? I started thinking about my own daughter and how much she can build using a paper towel roll, even without a live hamster to enjoy it, and well, there may be a hamster in my own future. Maybe. Dammit, Katherine.
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