Digital Age Descendants S1E4
Are parents the problem?
Are we the parents the problem in the digital age when raising kids. I wholeheartedly say YES!!!
I hardly touch my phone when I am at work because I use my hands for the job I do. I turn on my other podcasts or an audio book and start working. I get my entertainment this way, unfortunately I start looking at my phone when I get home when I need to pay attention to my kids.
I do this because it is usually the first solid block of time I can look at my phone for longer than 5 minutes.
I drive a large quantity of time for my job. I see people constantly distracted by various things while driving. In my career at my company, I have seen drivers driving with their knees while smoking a cigarette, I have seen drivers reading from their iPad, I have also seen drivers eating cereal from a bowl including the milk. The best thing I have seen is a young woman that was driving at 70 mph while putting makeup on with an eye pencil. I was waiting for her to hit someone or get rear ended and put the pencil through her eyeball.
I have seen all the aforementioned above while there were kids in the car. These are only a few things I have seen while driving. The biggest offense I have seen is drivers who are stopped at stop signs and the light turns green and doesn’t move, or a driver that can’t hold their lane while driving down the freeway. This is what kids see from parents older siblings etc…I am just as guilty of doing it.
So what are the kids going to emulate when they get older? What they see their parents doing. We as parents can’t get mad or punish our kids when they do it if we as parents do.
So, how do we as parents and humans stop ourselves from doing it? Simple answer is just stop doing it. One solution I have done is put my phone away in the center console. I set my music, audio book or podcast to play and leave the phone alone. That has worked for me because I am listening to the current thing playing not the text message that just came across or the latest email.
I would love to hear of your solutions to this problem. Leave a comment or voice mail.
NPR article I read rings true: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/21/742168987/parents-sometimes-youre-the-problem-when-it-comes-to-tech-use