Among American teenagers, sleep duration has decreased by one to two hours over the past forty years. The proportion of kids who sleep for fewer than seven hours a night has doubled in that time.18 To address the problem, many educators and other experts have recently started calling for a change in school hours, arguing that they are a poor fit for teenagers’ “natural biological rhythms.” That may well be. But no one seemed to worry about that forty years ago, and school hours were exactly the same as they are now. If our Digital Natives are in danger of becoming a generation of sleepwalkers—and the evidence suggests that is exactly the direction they are tending—maybe we could all use a wake-up call.
May 21, 2009
Christian, German exchange student friend of B.’s, here for weekend. Apologized about lack of technological hospitality but he seems more intrigued than repelled. (“My mother alzo vants to do zis!”) Boys amused selves taking Rupert to the beach, playing music, hanging out in front of fire, taking 2.5-hour nap (!!). Headed out to a party by bus after dinner.
A. & S. prognosticating at dinner on the subject of their future careers—a possible joint business venture of an indeterminate nature. They imagine “hell beautiful suits,” excellent hair (“I see a bun . . .”), and very large, very light-filled, very white-on-white offices.
“What will you actually be doing, though?” I ask. They look at each other and shrug. “No idea!”
May 22
B. delivered drunk at midnight, vomiting into the bougainvillea, croaking apologies as I stalk off to bed. Disgusted by the spectacle. Pleased, perversely, by the awfulness . . . assuming in my ever-hopeful way that there is such a thing as a lesson you don’t forget.
Discovered on couch at seven next morning, gravely reading Murakami (still reeking even after shower . . .). It was dark rum, he says, swigged straight from the bottle. Barf me out.
May 23
S. & A. fighting like catfish (do catfish fight?) over kitchen mess. If more cooking equals more mud-wrestling, takeout is looking good.
Mollified by news of S.’s top mark in math test. “This studying thing . . . I’m thinking I might try it again sometime,” she muses. We celebrate by eating cupcakes and inspecting Hazel’s teeth, exclaiming over their tiny perfection. Handheld kitten that she is, she endures patiently.
Okay, it’s not America’s Got Talent, but it works for us.
May 27
S. home sick with stuffy nose, fever. (“P.S. I feel like I’m going to throw up.”) She and Maddi conferring already on festivities for Independence Day, aka Return to Screens Day, on July 4. Should we make a video? What about B.? He’ll be in Germany on his water-polo tour then. Can we Skype him?
B. rehearsing for gig at local pub. Learning Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green.” Soaring, soulful, effortless, lyrical.
Thrilling-slash-annoying how much time now spent playing Satie (and/or humming ostentatiously to Brandenburg Concerto score—they are learning it in Music) while girls and self play Boggle. Hazel’s dentition continues to enthrall.
May 29
B.’s first gig! More a giant public jam session—twelve onstage (including B.’s teacher, who helped organize), eight in audience—but music good, and B. marvelous in school shorts and his orange Nikes.
May 30
To movies to see My Year Without Sex—charming/biting in equal measure. Favorite scene: kids at dinner party grumbling when all forced to watch the same DVD (despite being plugged into iPods, phones, and games anyhow). Says one prepubescent, rolling her eyes, “I can’t believe you only have ONE TV!”
S. summoned home from sleepover to clean room. Arrived scowling with friend Sean in tow, who lolled like a sultan on couch in TVLESS TV room, glaring into the corner where set once stood. Willing it to reappear, maybe.
Experimental conditions such a litmus test for friends . . . Really separates digital sheep from digital goats. Sean clearly among former. Ten minutes screen-free and he’s twitching like he’s spent a month in Gitmo.
May 31
Arrived home at nine p.m. to discover B. and four friends cooking eighteen fish on the grill. An impromptu birthday thing for Vinny, they explain. And a herring run at South Beach. I look around. The grill is still hot. Garlic and lemons litter the table. My jaw drops like a cod. “You . . . can . . . barbecue?” Shrugs.
Normally, I tell boys, he struggles to add flavor packet to instant noodles. They laugh conspiratorially.
June 1
Generally teary and emotionally labile all day. Injured no one appreciated my excellent chicken-mushroom stir-fry. Fought with B. on way to water polo. Laughed till I cried while writing column—then sobbed hysterically over awful news headlines. S. played me some hokey Taylor Swift song and I cried some more. After dinner, settled down to read Five People You Meet in Heaven—meant to be deeply inspirational and uplifting—and howled all the way through that too.
And so, soddenly, to bed.
June 2
Forced by B. to do the math, his friend Patrick calculates has spent six hundred hours playing Task Force 2 in past twelve months (equivalent to four months’ full-time work). “And he says he has no time to practice drums!” B. snorts.
“Hang on!” he cries in genuine horror. “That sounds like something you would say!”
Mary and Grant and family over for dinner prepared entirely by A.—assorted appetizers, amazing lasagna, salad, chocolate slice. Kids ate separately at cleared, candlelit craft table, followed by raucous game of Articulate and three hours of good, old-fashioned face time.
June 3
Was convinced my bank account had been skimmed, then that my briefcase with Filofax had been stolen from car. Mistaken on both (and innumerable other) counts.
Menopausal much?
B. reading six hundred-plus page Murakami novel on couch after dinner, wrapped in blanket like large purple burrito, Cannonball Adderley playing “Somethin’ Else” (recorded the year I was born). Fell asleep by nine with the blanket pulled over his face, and Hazel’s tiny head resting on his open palm.
June 4
One month and counting: anticipation, apprehension. Ambivalence!! Signed us up today for new Internet/phone bundle to connect in exactly thirty days’ time. Also made top-secret Foxtel inquiries. Yes, subscription TV, cable, a hundred channels, and nothing to watch. It seems something deep within me is longing for television! (Could this be my version of hot flashes?)
Girls reenacting chunks of Stepbrothers for me—“We are censoring it, Mum, don’t worry!”—then making hot cocoa and massaging each other’s feet.
A. invites us to smell her new fake tan. We accept. I serve stewed apples with whipped cream, which S. describes as “the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my whole life.” We sing along to Miley Cyrus/Taylor Swift mix tape—shame!—and dance with pug.
June 5
Long conversation with A. after dinner about the nature of evil. (Was it something about the meatloaf, I wonder?) Six months ago, was lucky to delve into the nature of bad hair days with her. Is reading Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart (at my suggestion) and swallowing it whole. Copying quotes into her journal.
Random! We are now a three-journal family.
June 6
After dinner, S. to Andreas’s house around the corner—a boy she hasn’t spoken to since Year 4—to, quote, “use his Internet!” No punches pulled there. Back at 9:30.
Visited Bill at new job—waiter and kitchen hand at Tasty Express—for muffin and coffee he barista-ed himself. Revelatory to see him as a public figure, dressed in a uniform and serving.
A. drove expertly to B.’s gig tonight—parking too. (Said proudly with straight face: “My instructor says I reverse even better than I drive!”)
June 8
Found myself leafing almost tearfully through a Radio Shack circular this morning.
Apple strudel yesterday, butter cake with orange glaze today. Let us eat cakes!
June 10
Everybody over it now. All a bit
sick, a bit cold, a bit bored, a bit ready to curl up for the winter with a screen—any screen.
Girls propose getting a new black pug to celebrate Back from Black Day. I’m thinking black sofas. And a new coffee table. And one of those entertainment units that look like a tabernacle to television.
Amused ourselves after dinner going through a tin full of kids’ old cards and “vouchers” (like Bill’s to me, aged nine, promising to “be sensible for half an hour,” and Sussy’s Mother’s Day card announcing her love was giving her a “hard-a-tack”).
Then fudge, then tea, then Boggle, then bed.
June 20
IKEA today. Allen key repetitive strain injury tomorrow.
Pleased nonetheless with sofas, tables, and a zillion new lights (as in “let there be ...”) for TV-room rebirth.
Confiscated S.’s phone just now as has been soldered to it all weekend, along with new cordless phones—yeah, I caved—which she is deconstructing feature by feature.
Reclaimed my study—aka the family phone booth—with a huge clean/wash/vacuum. Now that we are cordless again, have declared it a teenager-free zone once more.
June 21
Transformation! As if the family room has finally burst from its chrysalis: full of warmth and comfort and light after its Lenten gloom.
Kids arrive home as I screw in final frigging bolt. So like Christmas morning (to mix a holiday metaphor), everyone oohing and aahing and throwing themselves onto squishy new sofas face-first.
Euphoria snuffed out when B. asked about The Beast, and I told him I planned to relocate it to the passageway outside my study, out of sight lines of the television. Ugly exchange ensued but held my ground.
Ten minutes later we were debating with equal intensity—wait for it—the existence of God. It started with S. asking if I’d ever heard of Pascal’s Wager and B. entering the fray with full-throttle Dawkinsian ferocity and A. shouting out her two cents from the bathroom.
Note to self: Atheism a much better outlet for sixteen-year-old rebellious energy than furniture arrangement.
Before bedtime S. told me she’s decided to take down her MySpace page. Explained, “I guess I’m just over stalking people.
“Hey, there’s something you can put in the book,” she added proudly.
» 8
The Return of the Digital Native
He said, about leaving Walden . . . “Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and I could not spare any more time for that one.”
—AIDEN402, Best Answer to Yahoo! Answers question “Why Did Thoreau Leave
Walden Pond?” http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080208052927
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I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
—WALDEN, chapter 18
It was a shocking story no matter which way you looked at it, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised by Sussy’s distress when I recounted the details. How a stressed single father is in the kitchen preparing dinner for his three boys. How he calls the boys to the table but, as with the proverbial tree falling in the forest, no one hears him. How he calls again. And then a third time.
“Finally,” I say, “the father charges into the family room—and there the boys are, oblivious in front of their huge plasma TV. They are multitasking, of course, and have earphones in, so when he shouts they still don’t hear him. That’s when he loses it.
“He makes a lunge for the television and hurls it right through the sliding glass door, where it shatters into a million pieces on the deck.”
Sussy swallows hard. “And then what?” she asks in a little voice.
“Well, the neighbors hear all the noise, of course, and call the police, and they file a report. And in the end the Family Court gets hold of it, and, well, the man loses his children.”
It’s a pretty full-on story, and now I’m regretting I’ve told it. I can see Sussy is on the verge of tears. “You mean . . . you mean . . .” she quavers, “they never get the plasma back?”
Let’s face it. From a Digital Native’s perspective, pulling the plug on a person’s screens is pretty much pulling the plug on life itself. When I think about that, and think about the last six months, I am full of pride for what my children have accomplished . . . or endured ... or whatever you want to call it. I’m pretty sure they feel the same way.
In the United States, high school students reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death—the classic work on television culture—are advised to undergo a twenty-four-hour media fast to road test the ideas for themselves. Most are gutted by the effort. When I tell the children this at dinner one night, their collective scorn is wonderful to behold. “Pussies!” Bill mutters.
On the eve of Independence Day 2009, it occurs to me that I should sit everybody down for one final interview. Or maybe I should assign an essay topic (“What I Did on My Holiday from Technology”). But the truth is, I already know the results of The Experiment. We all do. Like Barry Marshall swallowing that vial of ulcer-causing bacteria, we have been our own observers, and our own observatory, the whole way through: researchers, subjects, and peer-review panel all rolled into one. There are no surprises at the end. And there is nothing particularly subtle about our findings either. The hypothesis (or did it start out only as a hope?) that six months without screens would cause us to reconnect with “life itself”—binding us together as a family, propelling us outward and upward as individuals—has been confirmed so often and in so many ways.
Collectively, we have stared down the Gorgon of boredom and learned to find diversion in the unlikeliest places: in the morning shadows on a bedroom wall, inside a kitten’s delicate maw, in the suddenly revelatory details of a suburban streetscape. Unstoppered from our digital dummies, we looked around for some substitute means of soothing our spirits and found—among other things—each other. We hung out on each other’s beds, and on the couch in front of the fire. We lingered for no good reason over dinner. We invaded each other’s space. Whereas before we’d scurry to our separate corners, we now found excuses to band together and stay there. As a family, our talk became more interesting, and our conversations more challenging, for one simple reason: because they had to.
Sure, there were expectations that remained unfulfilled, for both good and ill. I’d anticipated that life without the soundtrack of my iPhone would be a cross between a Celtic dirge and Patsy Cline singing “Crazy.” Instead, I reached the acceptance stage of grief practically unscathed. Who knew? I dreamed, too, of instituting a whole raft of sixties-inspired family rules. No eating between meals. Lights out at 10:00 p.m. None of your back talk, young man. I’d also hoped I’d lose twenty pounds, take up triathlon, develop more prominent cheekbones, and save money. None of these things, in the end, materialized either.
Then there were the outcomes that hadn’t been reckoned into the game plan at all. And these, possibly because they were so unexpected, were the most memorable of all. Bill’s metamorphosis as a musician, to take the most obvious case in point. At the time, it seemed such a bolt from the blue. But in retrospect I realize it was an evolution that unfolded logically as well as lyrically. Like an improvised solo that blows you away with its effortless, in-the-moment perfection, artfully concealing the hours of work it took to get there.
Bill remarked at the time that The Experiment was only a trigger for his musical awakening. I see the process in more Waldenesque terms, as a pebble dropped in a pond. Time freed up during The Experiment forced Bill to put down his gun, virtually speaking, and that created the first ripple. Giving up gaming didn’t simply make a space for new growth. It created a massive crater, a vacuum all but shrieking to be filled. The second ripple was all about reconnecting with a different group of friends. Tom, Matt, and Will were already marching to the beat of a different drum kit, to paraph
rase Thoreau’s famed metaphor. Through them, and his new teacher, Bill was introduced to a massive, multiplayer game with an infinite number of levels. Jazz.
Sussy’s six months of detox worked wonders on her dysfunctional media habits, just as I’d hoped. What I hadn’t anticipated was that the landline would become her methadone. Okay, so win a few, lose a few. The impact on her sleep hygiene had consequences both expected and surprising. In the months leading up to The Experiment, the baby had definitely hit rock bottom as far as quality and quantity of sleep were concerned. A spell in digital rehab was exactly what the doctor would have ordered (though he might have had to friend her first on Facebook).
What I hadn’t anticipated was the ripple thing. I didn’t imagine that getting more sleep would create a kick-on effect in virtually every aspect of Sussy’s life and would transform her relationship with me and her siblings. Her moodiness and all-round bolshiness, which we’d put down to being a teenage girl (increasingly spoken of as if it were a preexisting condition) turned out to be largely a function of being tired. The Experiment had given us all a gift of time. But to Sussy it was literally a gift that kept on giving. With her sleep debt finally fully paid up, with interest, she was up for so many new things—cooking, reading, beating the bejesus out of me in Boggle—because she now had the energy for new things.
The Winter of Our Disconnect Page 25
