Jeff Edelstein: Smartphone addiction fight begins now
We took the kids to Chick-fil-A a week ago Friday. My two daughters, 8 and 5, and my son and his buddy, both 9. One of those treat nights for everyone involved. The boys sat at one table, my wife and the girls at the other.
My wife saw something.
She pointed to the boys, and noted they were laughing and talking with each other while they ate.
Then she alerted me to the table next to us. Four girls, probably 11, 12. Just a few years older than my son and his friend.
They were sitting there, eating just like the boys. But they weren’t laughing. They weren’t talking. They were all looking down at their phones, texting, messaging, Instagramming, Snapchatting, Tweeting, whatevering.
The word that came to mind was “gross.” It was just gross, seeing these girls zombified by their tech. Worst part? I’m sure they were talking and laughing a year, two years, three years ago, whenever it was they didn’t have phones in their back pockets.
“We’re never getting him a phone,” my wife said to me.
Hard to argue with the sentiment, even though we both know it’s a losing battle. Can you imagine a teenager without a phone today?
Later that night …
My wife and I were in the kitchen. She was having a glass of wine, I was having some Maker’s Mark. We were just chilling, talking. My son and his friend were hanging out upstairs, the girls playing with their “Top Wing” figures. It was a rare moment of honest-to-goodness suburban bliss.
My youngest came in the kitchen, and apropos of nothing picked up my wife’s purse (pocketbook? handbag? whatever), threw it over her shoulder, and started sashaying around the kitchen, saying, “Ooh-la-la, look at me, I’m mom.”
I laughed. It was funny. So of course, I responded with, “Do me! Do me!”
She was confused for a moment. She hadn’t planned on pretending to mimic my wife - who, I should mention, does very little sashaying and even less ooh-lala’ing - and now here I was, putting her on the spot.
Pretty quickly, though, my daughter’s face changed. She had it. She was going to Rich Little me. I couldn’t wait.
She ran out of the kitchen and grabbed an old telephone handle from our old phone that’s been fashioned into a toy. She walked back in the kitchen holding the phone upturned in her left hand, and with her right hand she was pretending to manipulate it like a smartphone.
In short: When faced with the task of impersonating me, she immediately thought the best way to do so was to show me face first in my phone.
It stung more than I let on. And the worst part? The only reason I wasn’t face first in my phone at that moment was because the NBA was on All-Star break and I had no Fantasy teams to track that night.
Some reckoning is called for, clearly.
The easy way out? Moving my family to an sparsely inhabited island in the South Pacific without WiFi, open a Chick-fil-A franchise, and live happily ever after.
The hard way: Figure out a way to not have my kids become smartphone junkies like their dad. It seems easier said than done.
For starters, I really do have to change my own behavior. I don’t want my kids to grow up with their chief memory of me is me glued to my phone. So I plan on limiting my own usage in the house. Most of my in-house use is fantasy and gambling-related. No reason I can’t pack it into a tighter window closer to gametime. So I’m going to do my part.
As for my kids? I’m freaking clueless. It’s getting closer to the time when my son’s friends will start getting phones, and I know we’re going to resist as long as we can. Eventually, we’ll cave. And then the question will become how to convince him and his friends to holster them and engage in one another instead. Honest take? It seems impossible. Really. Hate to be a defeatist, but what else is there to do?
I guess the world has changed, and I’m becoming the old fogey. I assume those girls at the Chickfil-A will be fine, but no one will ever be able to convince me we’re losing something in the process, namely honest-to-goodness human interaction.
I’d like to say after all this happened I went into the living room and got down on the floor to play “Top Wing” with the girls, but I didn’t. Writing this, I couldn’t remember exactly what I did later that night.
So I checked the history on my phone, and guess what? I was researching past NBA All-Star games, looking for an edge in the contests that were coming up Sunday. I ended up losing a ton, as it turns out. I suppose there’s some poetry in that.
Jeff Edelstein is a columnist for The Trentonian. He can be reached at jedelstein@ trentonian.com, facebook. com/jeffreyedelstein and @ jeffedelstein on Twitter.