We’ve all experienced it; you’re sitting in a room with several other people and you look up to find every single person with their eyes glued to their phone.
We want to be with other people in a social context, yet even when we get the togetherness we crave, we can’t let ourselves be totally present and engaged with those around us. We have to send a few texts or check social media to see what everyone else is up to. That’s the society we live in today.
It seems as though we are driven by the need to be connected with others on a broad spectrum. We have an inability to be with others without picking up our phones and an even bigger inability to just be alone with our thoughts. An actual face-to-face conversation with someone or even a phone call seem like daunting tasks.
More and more kids have a smartphone or access to someone else’s. In fact, just the other day, I watched in shock as a two year-old unlocked an iPhone and proceeded to open an app. This is a stark contrast to how I grew up. My siblings and I were constantly coming up with new ways to entertain ourselves, none of which included the use of cellphones or computers. We learned to create our own fun. We would explore the woods around our house for hours, play man hunt in the yard, and even play hide-and-go-seek with rollerblades on (this made it more fun trust me). If I wanted to talk to my friends outside of school, I anxiously called their home phone without knowing who would answer and asked if I could talk to them.
When I look back at my childhood, I can’t help but smile nostalgically at the simpler times. I can’t imagine looking back and only remembering staring at a phone or computer screen playing games all day, or worse, fishing for likes on social media. That being said, I don’t want my kids to have cell phones or social media, at least not until they are older or I feel it is necessary.
I want my future children to have the same experience I did as a kid. I want them to grow their minds’ capacity for creativity and imagination rather than their number of contacts or followers on social media. I want them to develop the ability to be introspective and alone with their thoughts. I want them to develop their own identity, without being influenced or pressured to look or act a certain way by what they see online. I don’t want them to dread or shy away from communicating with someone face to face. I don’t want them to miss out on what the world has to offer because they can’t peel their eyes away from their phone screen.
I know this will be hard for them to understand; they won’t be able to grasp why I’m depriving them of something their generation will place so much importance on. But I hope one day they can look back with gratitude and realize that their cell phone-less childhood was a blessing in disguise.