TECHNOLOGY PROFOUNDLY ALTERS PARENTING IN THE 21ST-CENTURY
Ascent of smartphones in daily family life raises issues unimaginable a few years ago
When Judy Arnall gave birth to her first child, it was the early 1990s, years before the smartphone, with its attendant non-stop videos and social media, was anything more than science fiction. Baby No. 5 didn’t arrive until the mid-2000s; by that time, Facebook, Twitter and other social media had already taken over our daily lives.
“My oldest and youngest were raised in completely different environments,” says the parent educator and author of the bestselling book Discipline Without Distress ( judyarnall.com). “Parents today face challenges we hadn’t even imagined a quarter of a century ago.”
A good decade before Arnall even started her family, though, at least one of those emerging technologies was the hot topic at the annual meeting of the National Council of Family Relations in San Francisco.
A debate was raging among the continent’s top parenting experts on just how significant the introduction of the personal computer would be on family life — and whether such devices should even be allowed into homes.
So it’s no surprise that as Alberta marks another Family Day on the third Monday of February, those on the front lines of family education are sounding a rallying cry to put away our devices and actually have some face-to-face time with our loved ones rather than FaceTime.
“We started it last year with the YMCA,” says Julie Freedman Smith of No Phone Family Day (NoPhoneFamilyDay.com), a campaign that encourages Albertans to leave their phones in the chargers for the day, get out and be active as a family or simply have some at-home time that doesn’t include the use of smartphones.
“We were all talking about kids on their devices just a few years ago,” says Freedman Smith, another local parenting educator and co-founder of Parenting Power (parentingpower.ca).
“Now the problem is that parents are the ones looking at their devices even more than the kids.”
When the late premier Don Getty led the charge to create Family Day — a move heavily criticized in the late 1980s but now a much-anticipated midwinter break for most Albertans — it was presented as a way to firm up the one or two-adult household: the traditional mom and dad with kids family structure.
In 2018, that family makeup has been overtaken by households with one adult living alone, couples without children, samesex couples with or without children and multi-generational families, whether those are immigrant families or ones with adults returning to live with their parent or parents.
Still, the major raison d’etre of families with children is to care, nurture and prepare them to be healthy, happy and contributing members of the greater society.
Such a goal, says Arnall, has become increasingly hard-won in the 21st century, largely due to the dominance of technology over so much of our daily lives.
“The No. 1 struggle for parents is controlling their kids’ screen time,” says Arnall, who offers workshops and training on everything from parent effectiveness to understanding the toddler brain.
Along with many older kids’ addiction to social media, parents’ reliance on such tools have also caused much pain and struggle.
“They feel such judgment from sites like Facebook,” she says. “Nobody posts the crappy things that happen, so it looks like everyone else is doing so much better than you as a parent.”
Spending too much time on social media, says Freedman Smith, is also having a deleterious effect on children’s development.
“Little ones need to look at their parents’ faces to learn how to enunciate words, develop their brains,” she says.
“We are now seeing a sharp rise in the need for speech therapy, because kids aren’t getting those opportunities for development, as well as behaviour problems.”
The all-encompassing role of social media, says Gillian Ranson, has also caused many well-meaning parents to rely on it for help and guidance. That approach has taken many down a rabbit hole of conflicting and, oftentimes, outright wrong information.
“Pretty well all parents are devoted. They want what is best for their kids,” says Ranson, a University of Calgary professor emerita in sociology and author of the upcoming book The Parents and Children Project: Raising Kids in Canada Today. “They are being bombarded with information, as well as a lot of judgment.”
Those “watching eyes,” she says, create a paralysis in many parents. “One of the spinoffs we’ve seen in the last few years is that parents are incredibly careful about what they allow their kids to do outside. There’s a vigilance and level of supervision we’ve never seen before.”
Tom Buchanan says at least some of the hyper-vigilance is coming from a place of guilt. “Both parents are working more than ever,” says Buchanan, chair of the sociology and anthropology department at Mount Royal University. “There is a lot of stress about work-life balance.”
That overcompensation, say these experts, helped lead to the “helicopter” parenting of the past two decades, something that many have backed off from in recent years.
Still, the pressure is constant, especially for those who spend lots of time on social media. “We have 13,000 babies born in Alberta in a year,” says Arnall, “and yet maybe only 100 sign up for courses on the toddler brain. So little of the credible, research-backed information is getting out on social media.”
It’s ironic that such a small number of Albertans are getting the proper information since some of the most groundbreaking work on child brain development is being done right in our own backyard.
“The Alberta Wellness Foundation and Paxis Institute, those two entities are our best gold pots of science,” says Carlene Donnelly, executive director of CUPS Calgary, a local organization devoted to improving the lives of families facing the adversity of poverty.
Most of Donnelly’s clients aren’t in a financial position where screen time is even an issue.
Their biggest challenge is breaking the cycle of poverty; the main aim of CUPS is to build resiliency in those families so that the children can thrive and have the tools to participate fully in society.
“We have learned so much over the past few years about what children and their families need to overcome these challenges,” she says. “We are seeing families doing a better job of implementing the science.”
Parents and caregivers with greater resources, then, need also to rely more on facts and research than chat rooms, forums and faux-news internet sites.
Still, longtime observers like Ranson, herself a parent, says that on this Family Day, all of us should take a moment to think about the hard work parents do to help nurture and prepare the next generation for adulthood.
“We should be easier on parents. We should be more willing to step in and help rather than judge,” she says.
Arnall agrees. “Most parents are doing their best, they love their kids. They need the support of their community to succeed.”