I wrote this a while ago, but a recent conversation with friends reminded me of it again.

I was trying to fall asleep last night and, annoyingly, my mind wouldn’t shut up. I should have the discipline to hop up and write down all of the ideas and light-bulb moments that fly around in my brain at inopportune times, but, most of the time, I’m too exhausted. So, I made a few notes, rolled over and slept hard. Luckily, this morning, it all came back to me. I was pondering computers and cellphones and iPads and how they’ve slipped so easily and silently into our lives and taken over. Technology has given new meaning to the phrase tied to your desk, only there isn’t a desk, just a tiny, vibrating rectangle of demands that lives in our pockets and purses before, during, and after business hours. It has been on my mind a lot lately because I have children. We who are currently parenting any child between infancy and the teenage years, are the first generation of parents who are being challenged to navigate this world of burgeoning technological advances. New ones happen before we can even catch up with the old ones and our children roll with the leaps and bounds, daring us to keep up. There is no rulebook, very little research and limited incentive to take it slow.

I have boomeranged between wanting to monitor every moment, restrict screen time completely or give short windows of access, to throwing up my hands and admitting that the uphill struggle is too exhausting. I try to explain to my children that this is uncharted territory, that as a parent, I need to keep their best interests front and center, but because I don’t know exactly how the world of technology is going to effect their development, I have to go with my gut. That elicits sneers and laughs, because in their world, gut instinct is extinct. If you can’t google it, it must not be true. If you can’t find a study to prove it, it isn’t real, and if you do find a study to prove it, it’s just as easy to find an opposing opinion. This opens up a messy world of concerns. Are we raising a generation that will put more faith in their phones than in their instincts? When their existence is more about persona than person, how does that translate into being?

My instinct right now is to try to teach self-regulation. Logically, that can only happen by modeling self-regulation. That is the hard part. When we, as adults have come to depend so completely on, and live so completely in, the world of our tiny pocket bosses, telling children to put them down now and again, falls on deaf ears. They can’t differentiate the line between using technology as a tool or simply as a vehicle of mindless occupy. It is an age old adage that children live what they see. It doesn’t matter if we are answering emails, reading the news, or checking Instagram, all they see is our eyes focused on a screen for most hours of the day, and they don’t understand why the rules should be different for them.

I’m not so sure that they should be. We don’t know yet how those countless hours effect our mental and physical health, the health of our relationships, or the health of our family units. Clicking fingers are now as common as lit cigarettes were in the fifties. Everyone’s doing it with abandon, at the office, in the restaurant, walking down the street, driving in our cars, lying in bed. Cigarettes turned out to be lethal, and brutally addictive. We are quick to condemn all sorts of addictions. Is technology exempt? It is here to stay, so why not teach ourselves how to use it, while we teach our children? Why not have email business hours, just as we have regular business hours? If, in the past, we wouldn’t consider calling someone at home, after hours, why is it suddenly okay to text and email at all hours? I say, if we’re not willing to pick up the phone and interrupt dinner or bedtime, we shouldn’t be willing to send that email or text. Technology removes us from the situation just enough that it feels okay. If we’re setting boundaries for our youth, why not try setting boundaries for ourselves? Let’s remind ourselves, while we teach our children, that our phones and computers are important tools for communication, development, and yes, even research and creativity, but the real world is what’s happening around us. It happens fast and furious and the years slip through our fingers and time throttles us forward. I, for one, want to cherish every single moment.