Obsessions Beyond Their Phones: Device Fair This Weekend Showcases Alternatives to iPhones

(Guest Essay by Ariana Green)

“My kids need addictions — the good kind,” a father of four told me at a party in Hastings a few weekends ago.

He explained how his high school daughter had become a ranked competitive swimmer, his sons devoted hours to their basketball team, and his fourth was exploring several passions. “Without hours devoted to all of this, I know they’d be bothering me for a smartphone,” he said woefully.

Last spring, Lisa Berman and I started IRL Scarsdale for just this reason. We are a chapter of IRL NY, a nonprofit now active across five Westchester towns, dedicated to “taking childhood offline and into real life.” We know our kids have so much to discover. We believe that as parents we can help our children find and develop their interests, not just by signing them up for extra-curricular activities, but also by working together as a community to remove the distraction of early access to social media and phones with apps, texting and web browsing.

The Alternative Device Fair this Saturday 11/22 from 10 AM to 12:30 PM at Scarsdale Public Library is a free event showcasing some of the devices on the market designed for families who want connectivity for their kids, but not at the expense of having time for in-person pursuits and spending meaningful time together.

This event is a small start to a much bigger movement that we know Scarsdale parents are ready to lead. We can and must band together to set healthy technology norms for our kids. In the process we are going to help every child find their strengths — as friends, athletes, scientists, writers, artists, or whatever they dream to be.

With that in mind, I wanted to share my personal experience, which I believe will help parents as they head into this weekend’s fair. I won’t be buying a device on Saturday because I want to wait until my kids are older, but I am eager to learn about these devices from reps flying to us from throughout the country. My oldest child is in fourth grade, and so far, I’m taking several approaches to keeping her off of devices.

Strategy Number One: Unabashed + Unsubtle Indoctrination

At the airport last year, all three of my kids came close to me at once, eyebrows up, pointing and whispering some version of: “Mommy, she looks no older than seven, and she has her own iPhone, that’s too young!”

I shushed them a bit — no public shaming is ever called for — and recalled what my daughter would tell me in second and third grade: “Mommy, some of my friends have a text group, but I have no interest in joining, it sounds stressful!”

She had of course heard my complaints about my own group chats — some through school classes or other affinity groups — that would ping me when I didn’t care to be pinged, and I remember feeling self-satisfied that my perspectives were filtering down. (Note: Per below, self-satisfaction is a dangerous emotion to release on the parenting seesaw, not least because it is fleeting.)

A couple of years before Jonathan Haidt’s instant bestseller The Anxious Generation came out, I started to talk directly to my kids about technology and why our family has the approach we have, mostly because I became worried hearing from friends with older kids.

If the topic of social media came up at the dinner table, I wouldn’t shy away from it: “Your friend’s mom told me last week that her fifth grader finds Snapchat makes her sad because the kids turn on their locations, so each kid knows where everyone is. If a few of them go to Haagen-Dazs after school, the ones who weren’t invited feel hurt and left out.”

To that story, my then eight-year-old daughter replied, “But isn’t it normal that not everyone goes everywhere all together every time?” And then, before she could take another breath, amended: “Wait, that would actually hurt my feelings. It’s really better not to know.”

I’d be lying if the story ended here. Fast forward a couple years to last night, after I drove a carpool during which my daughter’s friend talked about the two text groups she accesses through an iPad. We arrived home, and my daughter delayed eating dinner to write me a two-page letter asking me to consider giving her an iPad, or at least to pilot a text group with her friends on my phone. Her main point: Mom, I support your movement, but until your social change takes hold, I’m being left out.

I’ll see this afternoon if she has already forgotten about her missive from last night, but of course the older she gets, the harder it gets to be the odd one out. That’s why parents can come together to agree to wait longer on text groups and the rest.

Ask any cult leader — indoctrination works best on the young. My cult is that of Device Suspicious, and I am a proud (if sometimes questioned) leader.

Strategy Number Two: My New Dinner Party Friend Called Them “Good Addictions”

My thoughts on how to structure afternoons changes by the school year. When my close-in-age kids were little and I decided to scale back from a very busy work life to structure my schedule so I had time with them, I was inclined towards cozy and communal time playing together at playgrounds, reading at the library and going on excursions. As my kids have gotten further into elementary school, they have real interests and talents, and they want to work hard at them.

I get it. I was a kid who spent six days per week training several hours a day (by middle school) in a pre-professional program at a major ballet company, and boy did I love it. It made me disciplined with my schoolwork, but more importantly, years before I read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow, I knew what “flow” was because I felt it every day while dancing. For me, it was good to be busy with something I loved after school.

Not every kid wants to be occupied, and that is completely fine. This year, I unglamorously eat some of my weekday dinners in the car, the dance studio waiting room or at the basketball court. My middle child wants to play what feels like almost every sport, and my oldest wants to dance five days per week. So we’re trying it.

Every year, we make it up as parents, see what our schedules can handle, how we weigh the benefits of extra-curriculars with the costs of divided time and delaying bedtimes.

Strategy Number Three: Deviceless Creative/Physical Free Play

Despite this being our heaviest extra-curricular year to date, my son was not happy yesterday afternoon when I told him I had to write a quick editorial so we wouldn’t be able to spend 45 minutes of unstructured time tossing a football together at the playground. I was sad, too; now that fewer kids congregate, I look forward to my “recess,” running and passing while talking about the day with one son as the other does monkey bars and plays with other little ones.

In an ideal world, more friends would reliably congregate with us so my son could play a real football game — and they used to in warmer weather — but it’s never as many kids as I’d think would, a chicken-or-the-egg question as it pertains to the need for all the structured activities.

Scholars and personal experience tell us that devices rob us and our kids of time to play freely, and make our attention spans shorter. I try small ways to live more slowly with my kids and to find joy in just playing. I love watching them with friends or with each other as they make up plays or do engaging projects.

When their friends come for play dates, they know by now that we don’t have video games or iPads (we do have Kindle Fires for airplane rides or sick days) but we do have a giant bounce castle, ping-pong, an ample board game collection, art supplies aplenty and a yard to play sports. This weekend, at the Device Fair, we will be decorating a Device Box, a repository for each of us to place our devices.

Strategy Number Four: Tell Them Policies Change

When I joined YouTube Premium during the pandemic to get Spanish language content for my kids, the benefit of having an educational component was soon outweighed by the constant stream of garbage that came on afterward. If I wasn’t hovering (and wasn’t that the point?), who knows what they were going to see.

When I took YouTube away not long afterward, I was not surprised to hear, “Why? Not fair!”

My answer? “I’ve gathered more information by watching what this shows you and what it does to you, and I’ve changed what I think about it.”

For parents with older kids who already have devices, it’s okay to say to a younger child: “I’m sorry, I understand you are sad that you won’t get a smartphone as early as your older sister did, but let me tell you why I made this decision: There is more research now, and I’m convinced I’m doing the best thing for you. Plus, I’m talking to your friends’ parents, and many of us are doing this together.”

There is so much you can cite for them. I attended this month’s Scarsdale PTC Technology Committee event on digital predators, during which Laura Forbes, Bureau Chief and Internet Safety Coordinator at the Westchester County D.A.’s office discussed how even so-called child-friendly apps, like Snapchat and Discord, have predators.

Detective Chris Moleski, of the Scarsdale Police Department, who teaches a class at the Middle School, discussed how our local children have been victims of sextortion and cyberbullying. Forbes said some cases before them have involved games including Roblox, with game predation being in some ways scarier because it's under the guise of cute characters.

Panelists pointed out how it becomes very difficult to monitor kids’ phones when something that looks like a calculator app can be an encrypted photo app. Kids are generally more tech savvy than their parents.

You can tell your kids that it isn’t just parental policies that change. Laws change in the race to keep up. When I collaborated with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Technology and Civil Liberties Division in 2011, we were working to update privacy legislation that had been on the books since the 1980s, when VHS’s were the cutting edge technology. Parents can and should move quicker.

Denmark recently pushed the age for social media to fifteen. Earlier this month, Caroline Stage, Denmark’s minister for digital affairs told the Associated Press: “The amount of time they spend online — the amount of violence, self-harm that they are exposed to online — is simply too great a risk for our children.”

I’ve noticed that the younger siblings of iPhone toters truly understand some of the pitfalls of technology absorption. I’ve heard my kids’ friends complain about how their older siblings used to play with them and have fun with them on family trips but turned into device-obsessed kids who ignore their families to chase likes and scroll.

Strategy Number Five: Engage with IRL Scarsdale, the School Board and School Administration

IRL Scarsdale brings parents together to support each other in navigating technology and kids. We want to facilitate parents informing their friends about the many reasons to come together to set new norms. Our website has a yearly pledge so that parents can renew their commitments to delay social media and smart devices each year (and beyond eighth grade, when Wait Until 8th ends).

Today I attended a coffee with members of Scarsdale’s School Board, open to all residents. Parents are regularly invited to ask questions about how our schools are approaching technology. I asked the Board to encourage the powers that be to issue evidence-based guidance to teachers for a more uniform and best practices-based approach to device time and device use, both at school and at home with school devices. It seems a heavy burden to put on teachers to figure it out for themselves, and the noticeable inconsistency is difficult for students and parents.

We can all show up to School Board meetings to plan for a future we want for our kids. On the academic front, for me that is a future that prioritizes critical thinking, creative thinking and the ability to spend focused time absorbing literature or working through problem sets.

IRL Scarsdale welcomes volunteers to create programming and help us on our events and outreach. We want all of our kids to grow up without having to perform digitally for peers. We want all of our kids to get to experience a childhood that is calm, with minimal friend drama and good sleep. There is so much to gain when we lose the devices.

Ariana Green’s writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Popular Science and Vogue.com, among other publications. She has been a journalist on a couple of continents and a tropical island, and an attorney for tech companies in Manhattan. Get in touch at Scarsdale@WeAreIRL.org.