Summer ‘break’ no holiday for parents

This weekend, like many parents, I’m standing at the precipice of the summer school break with mixed emotions.

I’m sure for some this is a time of packing up the camper or airing out the cabin, anticipating long summer days on a lakefront somewhere.

For others it’s the expensive scramble to find day-care spots or day-camp spaces in which to entrust our children while we continue working. And for some, especially those of us parents who are also teachers, it might be looking to an upcoming season that requires just as much planning and strategizing as a typical day in front of a class.

I am, of course, in the last category, but all modern parenting during school breaks requires a lot more planning and curating than it might have in the past. You may recall I declared a moratorium on screen time in our house a few weeks ago. This has required a lot of learning and self-restraint not only from the kids in this house, but for the adults too.

There’s an interval between the moment a child becomes bored and when they find something else to do, and this juncture is generally quite loud and often calls for an intervention to remind the kids how to function. Sometimes it feels like it’s only going to get worse, but we have to be patient. I call this high-conflict stage “Boredom Mountain.” I have to remind myself, when the fur is flying, that they’re just on the steep climb toward creativity.

I’ve come to a new realization about modern parenting, during a time when those of us who grant our kids some time on an iPad may be vilified as lazy, negligent or ignorant. I now know that parenting before screens dominated was not the same as trying parenting without screens, and those who would vilify us aren’t aware of the difference.

Children are predisposed to explore, to ask “why” and to generally discover how the world works by engaging in endless trial-and-error experiments that yield feelings of success or discovery. It’s how humans have come to understand our world for millennia, and it remains a joyful and wholesome way to move through life. Our job as parents has been to guide our children in their explorations, to be the ones to encourage or discourage them in their endeavours based on what we ourselves learned through a similar process.

Summer break was always a time when these explorations flourished. As children we burst forth from the school doors at the end of June and were either riding bikes, building forts in bushes somewhere or knocking on one another’s doors every day until September arrived. Our parents didn’t necessarily know where we were, but trusted us to come home each evening. This was parenting before screens: Children still had plenty of time to get up to no good, but generally those activities came with a lot of learning and growing through independence and experience. Adults were — and still are — boring, so we needed to make our own fun.

Adults are still boring, of course, and children will still be bursting out of schools this week, but many won’t be doing so to jump on a bike and speed off to some nearby park or bluff. Instead, they’ll be driven by similar desires for experience, adventure and discovery, but it will be mediated through a screen, and selected not through misadventure and the bad ideas of someone’s little brother, but through an algorithm engineered to commandeer their under-developed brains.

This inescapable pull is the weight on the other side of the modern parenting scale, the one through which we have to work even harder to safely guide our children. Parents have never, ever had such a significant and formidable foe battling for dominance of their kids’ brains. In order to ensure we’re raising healthy, happy, competent kids, we have to be unflagging in our resolve to defend their childhood against the aspirations of billionaires. What a weird thing to write. What a weird thing to realize. And what a daunting task for mere workaday mortals who wouldn’t mind a break themselves.

This is the new parenting — parenting without screens. There is simply no turning back the clock to a bygone analogue era. I can’t even log into my email or pay my hydro bill without my smartphone by my side to authenticate my identity. But I also can’t be the only source of amusement in our home — sometimes I need to be a boring adult.

Holding the line against the tyranny of the screen in our household is paying off, even if there are some mountains to climb along the way.

winnipegfreepress.com/rebeccachambers