While many of his peers are likely scrolling on TikTok and Snapchat, Laura Derrendinger’s teenage son uses an old rotary phone (Google it), relies on paper road maps to navigate while driving, and spends much of his spare time putting out fires as a junior volunteer for the local fire department.
The 16-year-old, who lives in rural Vermont with his parents and siblings, was raised in an entirely screen-free household and has neither an iPhone nor social media — but he is allowed to use an electric chainsaw under supervision.
“It is safer to give my kids a chainsaw than access to social media. A chainsaw is not designed to be addictive,” his mom said, and explained that her son asked for the power tool so he could use it to chop wood more efficiently for the maple syrup operation he runs with his siblings, aged 10, 12, and 14. The children also keep chickens and goats.
It’s sure not your average teenage experience, but Derrendinger is one of an increasing number of parents advocating for kids to grow up without screens and believes social media poses a grave threat to children’s well-being.
A mounting body of evidence supports that assertion. Earlier this month, a study found that teenagers in the U.S. are losing sleep by scrolling on their phones between midnight and 4 a.m., with consequences for their health and academic performance. In the U.K., a recent report by leading doctors has warned that social media is as dangerous for children as smoking.
The tide appears to be turning on tech companies after a landmark court case in California found tech giants Meta and Google, which owns YouTube, liable for a woman’s childhood social media addiction. And in New Mexico, a jury found that Meta’s social media platforms — including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — harmful to children’s mental health. The tech companies said they planned to appeal in both cases.
Some parents, like Derrendinger, a member of grassroots group Smartphone Free Childhood US’s leadership council, are going to great lengths to eliminate screens for their kids.
“We’ve moved at least 10 times as a family, all because of this issue of screens,” the 49-year-old public health expert told The Independent. “We do not have a TV at home and our children do not have iPads. My 16-year-old and 14-year-olds share a landline and do not use email or screen-based or Google products.”
Before becoming a mother, Derrendinger spent eight years working in war zones as a public health nurse with the global non-profit Doctors Without Borders, where she witnessed harrowing scenes.
“I spent my career before being a mom trying to prevent children from getting sick and dying in refugee camps because of pathogens like malaria,” she said. “I say now, essentially, that the research is telling us these screens effectively function like vectors of disease, the way a mosquito carries the pathogen of malaria.”
She referred to smartphones as “a mini addictive surveillance device.”
“We don’t have to call it a smartphone, we can call it what it is,” she said. “Instead of calling it ‘extreme,’ I’m saying what I’m doing is age appropriate,” Derrendinger explained.
Derrendinger and her husband decided to send their two teenagers to live with their grandparents 500 miles away in Washington, D.C. for a period so they could attend a private Waldorf school, which takes a “screen-free educational approach.”
“I couldn’t find a high school that was going to be willing to support my children the way I would need them supported, in terms of how I want them to interact with these digital online products,” she said.
Other parents told how they are taking steps to curb or cut screens from their kids’ lives, trying everything from relocating the whole family to get into a screen-free school, installing landlines and destroying the TV remote, to taking a digital detox at a remote farm.
Mom-of-three Ashley Dickson and her husband moved their family from Boston so that their boys, ages 13, 10 and 4, could attend a private Waldorf school in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Dickson, 44, knew she wanted to raise her kids in a low-screen environment before they were born. “I really just didn’t see any benefit to introducing screens,” she explained. Instead of sticking her young kids in front of the TV when she needed to take a quick shower, which she acknowledged many parents at first feel is the only option to get a bit of peace, Dickson set them up to “self-entertain.”
“When my kids were little, I would get a big stack of books and a bowl of dry Cheerios and they would sit in my bed while I would shower and get ready for the day,” she said. “My kids could be engaged in the work of childhood by self-entertaining, and so there’s no need for mom or a screen to be the constant playmate.”
Apart from finding Cheerios in her bed forevermore, the benefits of avoiding screens in those early years have been “huge,” she said.
“When we’re faced with a long wait time before a flight or at a restaurant, they’re great at coming up with their own games to fill the time,” she said. “I’m always amazed on long road trips how little they need to entertain themselves — an audiobook and time spent looking out the window seem to do the trick.”
When her eldest son, Soren, started kindergarten in 2018, Dickson said she was shocked by how frequently the children were using iPads.
“I just had no idea that was going to be part of kindergarten, and they were using them for math and reading,” the mom recalled, and said she worried that her kids’ education was moving “further away from play-based learning.”
Then, during the pandemic years, screen-based learning intensified from home as schools closed.
“There was no way I was gonna put my seven-year-old in front of a laptop for hours on end when I had the bandwidth to homeschool him,” Dickson said.
After a few years of homeschooling her children, Dickson and her husband sent them back to public school, but she remained dissatisfied with the amount of screen time in class. “It was even things like the teachers would put on a show during lunchtime to keep the kids sitting still and to keep them quiet,” she recalled.
More details here...
