It is important to have good guidelines for tech in your home. I know you will have frank and kind talks with your kids. But if your life is being reduced to endless vigilance and fear of dopamine hits and scary internet searches, that’s harming your relationship with your kids. It shouldn’t be how you spend your daily parenting energy. It’s also not your fault.
People (who don’t spend 24 hours a day with their children like homeschoolers do) have proposed lots of solutions. In speaking with some adult children who were homeschooled, many are going analog with flip phones and DVDs and a desktop computer out in the living room rather than iPads and laptops all over the house.
But regulation doesn’t mean that your kids are immune to the impact of tech all around them. And it doesn’t mean you won’t end up in emotional battles around the desire to use the most exciting technology ever created in the history of the world.
When everything you do feels countercultural (homeschooling, analog tech, add your other countercultural practices), you become exhausted fighting the cultural flow.
And I’m sorry that we are living in a time where parents feel called on to be at odds with their children and the culture all day every day.
That’s why you’re tired! That’s why you give up sometimes.
There are no easy solutions.
Let’s keep brainstorming how to support and help each other. That’s what I try to do in my books—I want to give you that support. You’re not crazy and you’re not weak for finding this moment in parenting really challenging.
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