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My story

I was born in 1978, which places me at the tail end of Gen X.

As kids, we were taught that if we wanted to learn something, we needed to go to the library and navigate our way through the 10,000’s of books to discover the answers to our questions.

We thought that social interaction was, you know, interacting with people around us.  Today, when we feel ourselves getting sucked into social media addiction, Gen Xers feel it, and notice it; it’s different from how we thought and lived for the formative years of our lives.

Yet we’re able to enjoy all of the benefits of this new world of technology.  We learned it at a young enough age to be able to adapt to the new ideas; but our character formed without its influence.

This is where I started in Part 1 of this series; Gen Xers have the best of both worlds.

Is there a secret to be discovered here?

I cannot be definitive here.  All of this is too new to speak of with any degree of authoritativeness.  But I think I am on safe ground to share with you what my approach with my children has been…

Adopted Gen Xers

My answer has been to raise my kids to be adopted Gen Xers.

I suppose my solution here is about the same as my answer to most other things when it comes to education—after discovering the biblical principles, then look at who did the best job with this thing, and just copy them.  For education, generally, that pretty much means the Puritans.  And when it comes to the new technology, the folks who’ve come out in the best shape, thus far, are the Gen Xers.

In short, as far as technology goes, my husband and I are trying to copy our own childhood for our kiddos.

No computers (even the tiny ones we carry in our back pockets).  Our children, until they are around driving age, are pretty much banned from using smart phones or computers, ever.  For anything.  They’re not even allowed to look at the screens their little friends want to show them at church.  Obviously, some of that is unavoidable, but that’s our rule, with flexibility for real life.  They see the screens of their parents’ (that would be my husband’s and my) phones, so please understand that we are not trying to go to extreme lengths like the Amish, or something.  But for the most part, they are only ever looking at the real world, and real people, just like my husband and I did when we were kids.

Modeling it.  And the two of us really try to limit our own smart phone use, especially around the children, so that we’re giving them a good example.  We don’t pull out our phones and start texting at the dinner table, or when we’re sitting together as a family.  And we really limit how much texting we do at all, anyway.  If that long conversation is worth having, we can have it with the person face to face, sometime.  If not, then the time is definitely better spent with our focus centered in our own home, where God has actually placed us.

For books/reading.  Even for reading, our adopted-Gen-Xer kiddos use real books to read, not screens, just like we did.  I’m going to double-down on that; I know I shared some research above touching on this topic, but here’s another article, about a compilation of 25 studies, showing that reading from a print book increases children’s reading comprehension six times more than reading the same material on a screen.  That’s not even close!

In other words… well, let me put it this way…  Have you ever noticed that you have trouble reading a long article online, even though you are a great reader?  If you read lots of books, how can you struggle with a piddlin’ article??  The difference is that the screens themselves have effects on your brainwaves that make it harder to stay focused.

Writing assignments.  My husband and I have our children do their writing by hand instead of typing.  (Studies have shown that children’s mental engagement is significantly improved when they write by hand.)  They do their math by hand.  (Don’t get me started on math curriculums that have children using calculators for anything earlier than Algebra II.)  They interact with their friends face-to-face, or with handwritten notes.

Reference/searching.  We teach our children to look things up in the dictionary, encyclopedia, and the all of the other resources we have in our home library, when they’re looking for answers.  But there are plenty of times when we look up answers for them on the internet, too, though, so we’re not going Amish and rejecting a helpful technology in our home entirely; we’re just keeping our children from directly interacting with it until they are young adults, and teaching them lots of valuable problem-solving skills along the way.

Screens.  Our children are not staring at those lit screens.  Like, at all.  We didn’t have those screens when my husband and I were their age, and we turned out just fine without having had them in childhood.  So I figure our kids will, too.  The worst that could happen is that they’ll learn how to use all of these things when they’re young adults, just like we did.  That doesn’t seem like any downside, at all.

As they get older…

Age 12-13.  When they’re around 12 or 13, I have them use a simple typing program to learn how to type, 10 minutes a day.  I want them to have that skill, and it’s super easy to learn.  My mother had me learn to type that way when I was 12.  (Did I mention that my plan with technology is just to copy what my husband’s and my experience with technology was, because that worked out pretty well for us?)

At this point, though, I still make them do virtually all of their schoolwork by hand, because we learn far better through writing by hand than typing.

Age 14 or 15.  At around 14 or 15, I’ll require them to start typing up their major writing assignments.  But they still do plenty of assignments by hand.  And I still don’t give them access to the internet on their own.  Again, my husband and I didn’t have the internet when we were that age, and we turned out just fine.  (At least, in the area of being able to utilize technology we turned out fine!)

Age 15+.  After that, I start giving them a lot more freedom to choose whether they want to do their work by hand, or by typing.  And I’m finding that they’re making just the same choices I was making at that age.  They like typing major writing assignments (it sure is easier to correct mistakes and make revisions!), but they prefer writing by hand for most other things.

Age 17-18.  Finally, we like the idea of giving them access to the internet and smart phones, maybe, around age 17.  That’s earlier than it was for us, but since the internet is so much more dangerous than it was for us (especially with social media and A.I.), we like the idea of being there to coach them through their entry into that perilous world, instead of leaving them to figure it out after they’re out of our house on their own.

What about STEM?

I’m restraining myself from going off on a major tangent here, but suffice it to say that with pretty much anything the modern education experts say, in my opinion, your safest bet is to do the exact opposite.

But even if you still want to trust the modern education experts who say that your kids will be better with computers if they start using them early, you might consider what the computer people think:  Silicon Valley is legendary for the tech giants’ banning the very social media and smart phones for their own kids, that they sell to everyone else’s kids.  Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sundar Pichai (Google CEO), Mark Zuckerberg, and the list goes on and on…  These guys, who created these devices, and have worked successfully to get them into the hands of children in every school that they can, forbade their own children to have smart phones.

For a more personal example, my dear husband is a software engineer of twenty-five years.  Yes, we speak from a deep knowledge of and appreciation for these technologies, when we have decided to make our children adopted Gen Xers, and to ban them from using smart phones or internet-connected computers.

So that’s what my husband and I do; we’ve made our children “adopted Gen Xers”, and give them a childhood entirely free from computers and smart phones.  Talk to us again in fifteen years, and we might have a completely different perspective, but for now, that’s what we’ve got, and it’s been working pretty well.

What do you think about these things?  Do you like the idea of making our children adopted Gen Xers, when it comes to technology?  Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Thanks for dropping by; please keep us in prayer!