Summers Before Screens

W ith sufficient will and support, parents can still give kids a mostly screen-free summer. There are summer camps that limit phone use. There are families who can organize enough device-free activity, and who simply ban the things from their house, or limit them very severely. Sometimes you can even give your child a kind of community of people doing much the same. Highly intentional private schools offer no-screen summer programs. Church groups exist where parents share the same suspicions about too much YouTube and too much iPad use.  

What you can’t give your child is a summer before screens. The normal kind of summer you had, with long languid stretches of boredom that had to be filled by your imagination, is no longer the default. The closest thing to it today amounts to a highly constructed, organized, and counter-cultural choice, usually made by parents with serious resources to spare on the formation of their children. Feeling like you are protecting the mental health and bodily development of a child makes you seem half-Amish (or half-upper class).  

What was normality a very short time ago is now a conscious protest of the present. If your kids go to public schools, their eight-year-old-boy peers are already speaking that strange Gen Alpha slang, half of which was considered “alt right” a few years ago. Those kids have access to entire seasons of their favorite television shows on demand. Their brains were addled as toddlers by creepy YouTube animation videos set to the “Daddy Finger” nursery rhyme, and now they are half-mumbling the techno remix of “Sigma Boy,” the bizarre recording of Russian child bloggers. The peers of your ten-year-old girl are giving themselves app-based color tests, to see which sets of shades the algorithm says most flatter their skin tones. They are sending TikToks with jokes they are too young and innocent to understand . . . at least for the next few hours.  

Before summer jobs and a teenaged car, my summers were filled by going to local parks and basketball courts, somehow successfully begging for a ride to friend’s house, or pulling some kind of distraction off our own shelves at home — a VHS, a CD, or a book. I spent weeks of one boyhood summer just looking through the huge atlases that my grandfather had collected.   

I wish I could have a “before screens” summer again. But it’s hopeless. Connected devices are part of being in civilization now. You can shut them off, but up there in the cloud, or in Irish data centers, the memes, emails, and marketing spam are piling up and waiting to be sent silently across the world and then jump through the night sky onto your device.  The demands of your boss, the notifications about birthdays from long-unseen friends, the  advertisements designed to make you feel just slightly status-conscious: They are all there with their insistent, impertinent demands.  The technology we’ve built has made the home more permeable to the outside world, to the social signals and the culture outside of it. Somehow the longest days of the year have been made shorter, and drained of their potential for adventure. All the attractions and left turns have been mapped out, rated by thousands of people before us, and made accessible to us through QR codes.