Family that learned to reconnect by pulling digital plug

SUSAN Maushart reached digital breaking point two years ago when she saw how the virtual world had become her family's reality.

Buying into the madness herself, she would text her three teenage children to come to the dinner table and hadn't had proper eye contact with them for months. "They were still having friends over, but more and more of their socialising took the form of little knots of spectators gathered around the cheery glow of YouTube or, worse, dispersed into separate corners, each to his own device. And there were other things they'd hit the pause button on – books, exercise, conversation," she says.

Her own relationship with technology was not healthy, either. At 50, she had become an iPhone addict. "I gave it a name, started buying it outfits and sleeping with it. I'd take it into the bathroom and other embarrassing stuff." She had developed a new vocabulary including LOL, OMG and the rest. And this from an academic, writer and broadcaster.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The single mother took drastic action, and describes that experiment in The Winter Of Our Disconnect, which charts six months in which all digital devices were banned.

It confirms what many parents fear about the adverse effects of electronic media on family life – and coinciding with new data from research organisation Childwise, which shows that the average child spends five two-hour sessions on the internet each week. About 90 per cent of British children use the internet and they increasingly use their own laptop or a smaller electronic device.

About two million under-13s use Facebook despite it being banned to under-13s. In one day they use the internet more than they spend exercising all week.

"I came home one day, saw the kids suctioned to their screen and cried out: 'What would our lives be like without all this stuff?'" says Maushart. "Of course no one heard me because they all had their earphones in." She was concerned at the number of hours her children, Sussy, Bill and Anni, then 14, 15 and 18 respectively, were spending on electronic media. "It wasn't cyber predators or the content of what the kids were doing that was worrying me. It was mostly about what they weren't doing".

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Computers, TVs, gaming consoles and iPods were removed, mobile phones hidden, the internet disconnected. "It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I found out much later that the kids didn't believe I was going to follow through with it. There was resistance but they didn't dig their heels in."

Initially, the children found other ways of accessing the virtual world. They used the internet at the library for homework, for example. But gradually their need decreased. Maushart felt a few withdrawal symptoms, she admits. "I was plagued in the early days by what seemed to be an absolute need to Google stuff. How often do you do that in the course of a day and think it's important? (But) it doesn't make you smarter or more efficient."

She spent a lot of money on entertainment at first. "That was one of the downsides. I thought we were going to save money, but books and movies are much more expensive than the internet. I also thought we'd all get fit and slim, which didn't happen either, partly because we all found it difficult to get into fitness routines without an iPod."

Surprisingly, the children were not shunned by their peers. "They regarded the whole thing as a wonderful novelty, and when they came to our house there'd always be somebody on the floor playing a board game. They would cook, make cups of cocoa, have old-fashioned sleepovers where, instead of having a DVD marathon, they'd sit on the bed and give each other make-overs."

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Her son picked up the saxophone he hadn't played for two years. "He's just about to enter an academy of performing arts, so it has literally changed his life. He sold his gaming computer to buy a new saxophone. His one regret is that he'd missed out on two years of playing and practising his instrument."

The most noticeably changed was her youngest child, Sussy, who had been suffering sleep deprivation due to hours spent on social networking sites. When the digital detox kicked in, she caught up on her sleep. "She became a different kid. She was so much more reasonable, less moody, less bolshy. So many of the traits I'd put down to her being a teenage girl, being hormonal, were due to sleep deprivation."

Once re-connected, the family went on a "media bender", but then calmed down and use them less than they did. The greatest gift, says Maushart, is that they talk to each other again.

Related topics: