Technology takes that away from us.”įew parents and their children are going to go cold-turkey for a year regardless of what Kolberg writes and medical associations recommend. It enhanced our relationships with our friends and family. I got out my record player and typewriter, we used the phone book and paper maps. She recalls: “We went back to the ‘80s, basically. A Silicon Valley writer (her husband worked in marketing) describes an experiment they did with their daughter in A Year Unplugged: A Family’s Life Without Technology. Sharael Kolberg says she was one of those parents. It pinches San Francisco Bay area parents with devices even more so.

The sting of parents considering themselves hypocritical in setting limits for their sons and daughters in using tablets, cell phones, and laptops at home while they are on the devices for long stretches of day and night-time ( average daily use of mobile devices for adults was five hours while awake) is an ever-present issue in Silicon Valley and across the country. “I’d give myself a B-minus or C-plus - and that’s up from a solid F at one point….The kids have called me out on it, for which I was grateful.” Listen to a manager for a Silicon Valley firm who limits his 12- and 10-year old daughters’ device time to 30 minutes a day yet he uses devices for hours: I do not know whether these high-tech leaders feel that way today (Jobs died in 2011) but there are other Silicon Valley dads and moms who work for Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and start-ups who wrestle with dilemma of valuing highly technology access and use but see the negatives of overuse of devices by their children. Steve Jobs, Apple, 2010 in reply to reporter about his children using newly-released iPads We limit how much technology our kids use at home. And I worry that we’re losing that.Įric Schmidt, Google CEO, Interview with Charlie Rose, 2009* I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.

I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information - and especially of stressful information - is in fact affecting cognition. We don’t have cellphones at the table when we are having a meal, we didn’t give our kids cellphones until they were 14 and they complained other kids got them earlier.

A Year Unplugged by Sharael Kolberg