Trusting Adaptation: The Human Ecology of Technology
Like many young mother’s, I was very idealistic about motherhood and the alternative lifestyle that I would be able to provide. I envisioned my child’s life free from all the things that were dysfunctional from my own family of origin. I would bring up the next generation of mindful, spiritual, sustainable indigo children that would “be the change”.
My first son, Zachary was born In 1994. When he was 11 months old, I made a big life decision and moved to a very remote spiritual community in Williams, Oregon. The first time I visited Williams, it was to meet the Cech Family of Strictly Medicinal Seed Company. I remember clearly having an experience on the drive out that was straight out of the book Celestine Prophecies. The sky seemed to open up, casting a deliriously beautiful light on the road and everything seemed to twinkle in my eyes as my heart began to sing a familiar old old song that made me want to curl up at the base of a tall tree and never leave the land. I was about to meet the family that would become my kin for the next 10 years, and I felt I had finally found home.
I lived in Williams for 10 years total, birthed 2 more children with a midwife and lived in small cabins and yurts. I was surrounded by many like-minded families who were seeking an alternative to the conventional culture that included herbal medicine, homeschooling, organic whole food diets, spirituality, music and creativity and lots and lots of fresh air. We were all trying to live a simple life. A popular bumper sticker read
“Live Simply So That Others May Simply Live”.
It was in Williams that I met my now long-time friend, Kathy. I was living on the Rock Creek Commune. She married Peter Paul who inhabited the enviable main house. When I met Kathy I was immediately drawn to her feminine strength and graceful mystique. She was childless, a belly dancer, college educated, financially independent, strong and sexy; a lot of things I admired at the time, but didn’t feel like identities I could claim. I didn’t have a lot of experience with mature female friendships. She did, and was happy to take the lead and a tender friendship followed that is still alive 20 years later.
When my husband died in 2003, I desperately needed a loan to buy a truck suitable for my family. Kathy generously extended a loan to me.
I’ll never forget the pride of independence I felt when I drove the truck for the first time. It made me feel like a salt of the earth mother; one that contained both the masculine and the feminine that would sufficiently guide my three boys to an idealized change-making adulthood outside the rigid gender roles of my own upbringing.
Ten years later, Kathy and I found ourselves in the small town of Ashland, OR. Kathy was freshly divorced and was beginning her journey as a single mom. I was able to house her little family for a few weeks while they made their big transition from the country to the city.
If you’ve never lived in a small rural spiritual community, I may need to make plain that the relationships are deep and rare.
Rural land based folks take risks together and depend on each other in a way that is profoundly bonding.
There are folks from my time in Williams whose names I may not remember immediately, but whose faces conjure a feeling of kinship that goes far beyond our corporeal identities and linear-time present lifestyles. We are land-family.
Twenty years later, my kids are grown and fully launched and Kathy’s are on the precipice as well. Kathy has written a book, Give, Save, Spend: How To Build Wealth and Change The World as well as founding Southern Oregon’s first Conscious Living Fair. I am a Resilience Coach , Garden Educator and Eco-Artist helping individuals and families build bridges between eco-idealism and the reality of collapse. As we reflect on the idealism of early motherhood together in the bohemian backwoods, we laugh and cry at how far our families’ are from the unattainably wholesome visions we started with.
We both started with no tv in the house at all, or if there was one, it lived under a dusty tapestry that was rarely removed. We encouraged our kids to read books, play with sticks, rocks, and lizards and sing, play dress up or build forts.
What we were trying to provide for our kids were long stretches of time to invite boredom from which we trusted creativity, authenticity and conviction would sprout that was desperately needed to dismantle the master’s house, end imperialism, war, mass production, capitalism and the entertainment culture that bred it. (Ok, that’s what I was counting on. Maybe not Kathy quite as much, but at least kinda.)
Long stretches of time that invite boredom are where the first sensing of the divine are born, where the first sound of one’s original voice are heard, where learning about yourself as animal are discovered.
The idea was that if we allow our kids’ mind caves to be filled with conventional cultural concepts of consumer, entertainment, and celebrity culture, they may have difficulty developing and maintaining their response-ability and belonging in the entangled ecology of the living world and that can harm the environment, and rob them of the self-esteem and purpose that comes from knowing they are a contributor to the enlivenment of systems of regeneration, beauty, hope and peace. (That may be more what Kathy was striving for.)
Kathy and I took a walk last week and this was the update on her kids she shared with me:
“My daughter is really struggling with social anxiety and having difficulty attending school. My son who is on the spectrum is depressed and doesn't have any direction after high school. Both kids are enmeshed and addicted to screen time and it is really preventing them from becoming healthy adults. The schools and the culture don't seem to provide any ongoing support for parents that helps us set boundaries, even though the school policies with lockdown made things WORSE! I'm also coparenting with another parent that is not supportive of consistency. What should I do?”
It’s fair to say that as our kids mature, we all compromise on the idealism we held when they were very small. But her description of her kids’ struggles doesn’t feel like a compromise of the original vision, it feels like a devastation of it, and she is certainly not alone. Every parent I talk to with tweens, teens and young adults are having the same concerns and are feeling at least somewhat helpless to do something about it. I want to offer some of my thoughts about the matter.
First of all, it's not your fault.
Don’t bother looking at some past small wrong decision you made as the turning point that led to your kids’ losing the ability to spend extended time in full presence without the interruption or full on embedment in their device. It was inevitable if your child wasn’t literally living under a rock for the last 10 years.
Social technologies were actually designed to snatch and keep our attention for as long as possible. In fact, the average American checks their phone 96 times per day, or once every ten to 12 minutes. It is by design.
When we started raising our kids we were vigilant to guard them against the harms of the consumer economy. Practically overnight it has morphed into the attention economy, faster than we could even become aware of what to safeguard them against. That is the nature of our current technologies- uncontrollable, unregulated speeding toward unpredictable outcomes. You can encourage your kids to know nature by teaching them the nature of these technologies, just like if they were a lizard they found in the backyard. It’s here. It’s not going anywhere, so there is no point in resisting it. Embrace it, know it, predict it, make boundaries with it, like a lizard brought indoors.
Second, It won’t help to look to authoritative systems to blame or implement control measures.
It’s happening faster than educators, administrators, policymakers, lawmakers etc can understand or get a handle on. I agree that the introduction of constant use of technology in schools is having a detrimental effect on children and of course the pandemic made that unimaginably worse when schools and jobs and social lives went online. We are only scratching the surface of understanding the impacts on youth of the vast increase in screen time.
Looking to institutions and authorities only externalizes control, ultimately inhibiting self-determination and personal responsibility. You won’t be parenting your kids forever, so it’s key to help kids to have an in-born awareness of how screen time is affecting their wellbeing and for them to develop *intrinsic motivation to keep a healthy balance of screen use for their own mental and physical health. Guiding your kids to self-awareness and self-responsibility is the only way to ensure their screen time habits follow them from one household to another when co-parenting in separate households.
My recommendation is to follow this three part ACT strategy.
1. Anticipate - 2. Contain - 3. Transform
1. Anticipate:
Start by rooting into the values your family holds. You can do this by having regular conversations about your values as a family. This can happen through intentional family time, such as game nights, movie nights or family meetings where you discuss values around what it means to be a healthy person, a transformational family and an engaged member of society. Use these opportunities to critically analyze a story or character with your children, revealing together the qualities and characteristics of individuals and society that are worth aspiring to.
Talk about individual and collective ways to navigate change and growth processes, and commit to how you collectively identify problems and make adjustments. The Family Crest Program guides you through identifying family values and turning them into action steps to take together to be an intentionally transformational and resilient family.
2. Contain:
Acknowledge and educate yourselves about the nature of our current technologies–uncontrollable, unregulated and speeding toward unpredictable outcomes. Discuss it regularly. I recommend the movie, The Social Dilemma and the Youth Toolkit created by the Center For Humane Technology.
Notice the impacts of screen time on each of you as individuals and on your family as a collective in a matter-of-fact and non-shaming way. I recommend doing this with simple “I notice” statements. For instance,
“I notice that when I spend more than a few hours consecutively doing computer work, I feel lethargic and uncreative and don’t have as much motivation to take walks and prepare healthy meals. What do you notice about yourself?”
Discuss possible responses to the technological landscape that are proportional to the impacts. Practice choosing the right strategies for the moment and be prepared to pivot as the tech landscape changes rapidly. The right strategies will be age and developmentally appropriate, under the control of the individual to implement, measurable, within the capability of the individual and self-determined.
3. Transform:
Continue to revisit and discuss your family values and connect those values to the changemaking strategies you are employing. Keep in mind that change is not static, but a work in progress. What you focus on grows, so focus on the desired outcome and celebrate small accomplishments.
Make necessary changes to the narrative and structure. It’s more important to focus on why you are being deliberate about screen time, than to obsess over the exact amount of screen time a person is engaged in. Stay focused on helping kids develop self-awareness rather than getting into power struggles and reward and punishment around screen use.
The reason this approach is truly transformational is because regardless of the particular subject you are working on together, the skills of self-awareness, the strategies for personal change and the ability to humbly engage with discomfort while maintaining a growth mindset are an immeasurable and permanent investment in character development. The long term character gains outweigh the short term reduced screen time wins.
I think it's fair to say that we all want our kids to develop and maintain response-ability to each other and the entangled ecology of the living world. When we see them staring into a tiny screen for hours, it feels like the rich character you want to see them developing is being painfully narrowed and sucked into a void. But let me offer you this: This generation was born into this environment and they will adapt like all organisms do. Those of us who had wall telephones in our childhood homes may have difficulty imagining how it's possible, but the key word here is imagine. Imagine the complete fulfillment of the values and character you want your children to develop and maintain. Imagine that together, in the face of mass technology, we are adapting to include care for the environment, self-esteem, purpose and efficacy on screens and off them.
