This week, in celebration of Tu B’Shevat there was a great deal of conversation about trees and our relationship to nature. I was so impressed by the connections that the children expressed feeling towards plants, trees and other living things. As I watch and listen to all that is taking place I have a sense that environmental issues may be more on the top of our children’s minds than they were to us growing up. There is increased awareness about recycling, reusing, and repurposing materials, and about the importance of being respectful of our larger ecosystems. In our school, we have talked about these topics before, and will again – as it is an important commitment of our school to raise children who see themselves in relation to the earth, to animals, and to plants, and who have will be able to appreciate the environmental challenges that we face today and that they will no doubt face in their lifetimes.
At the same time, I can’t help but worry about the many ways that our modern lives take us further and further from our connection to nature, and more and more connected to and dependent on technology and to the human-made creations. Our technology lets us do amazing things: cure scores of illnesses, operate with robots at a microscopic level, explore outer space, and communicate and gather information in remarkable ways. But during this time in the Jewish calendar when we focus on our connection to nature, I am acutely aware of how distant I often feel from nature, particularly as a city dweller, and particularly in this winter season. The prevalence of technology both in my life and in the life of my family exaggerates this feeling. My life is a long distance from getting back to nature, and I worry that we all spend too many hours staring at some form of a screen. Between my iphone, ipad, computer, email, and television, I wonder whether I will wake up one morning with a head shaped like a rectangular screen, in the same way that the young girl in Pinkalicious wakes up all pink having consumed too many pink cupcakes!
I worry the same about my children as I do about myself. While “screen time” (which includes TV and computer time) is regulated in my household, as my children have grown older it is increasingly complicated to distinguish, quantify and value all the various forms of screen time. Should I prescribe what amount of time is appropriate for doing homework on the computer? Does the answer depend on whether that homework is interspersed with other computer activities, and how would one go about quantifying these things? How much texting with friends is a healthy peer connection, and how much texting will retrain my child’s neural pathways? When my daughter skypes with a friend, is this any worse than the endless hours I used to spend talking on the phone with my school friends? How much time should we allot to vegging out in front of a TV show at the end of a long day? And what about the time we spend together shopping for new sneakers on Zappos on the internet? And perhaps most difficult: While I may feel relatively comfortable justifying any one or maybe all of these forms of screen time on their own, what is the net effect of all of these hours spent staring at these electronic screens?
I try to hold balance as the goal here – knowing that balance does not actually mean having it exactly right every moment, and that there will be days or weeks when the needle swings too far one way yet still can be brought back towards and even past the middle. I’ve pushed the pendulum back sometimes. For instance, when I discovered my child with her laptop in her bed at 11pm, I concluded we needed to make a policy about when the computer gets shut off at night. When I saw my daughter texting while walking down the street, we needed to discuss street safety. When my child complained he was bored and couldn’t think of anything else to do, I saw that he needed more practice entertaining himself without a screen. And recently, when my daughter wondered whether to have a difficult conversation by text, I was pleased to discuss and ultimately encourage her to pick up the phone and make this connection in a more intimate way.
But amidst all of these discussions with and about my children’s relationship with technology, I am acutely aware of the way that this disease inflicts me as well! I myself rely too heavily on screens for entertainment, the internet for shopping, and email for communication. These are certainly very valuable tools, but within limits. And I am quite certain that as long as I am texting on the streets, and answering emails while snacking in my kitchen, I am not serving as the role model I aspire to be for my children.
Over the past few months, I have tried to use shabbat as an opportunity to change my relationship with technology. It has been far harder than I expected. I end up feeling anxious that perhaps there is something in my email inbox that requires some kind of urgent attention. But I have persisted as best I can in using the day to abstain from email. It feels like a day without email is qualitatively different, in a host of ways, and putting down my electronic bricks can make shabbat as a day truly, and usefully, different from the others. While there is much that I already treasure about Shabbat in my life –lighting candles, having beautiful shabbat dinners, going to synagogue, have lunches with friends, spending time with family, and so on, so long as I am still checking my email on shabbat morning and sometimes other times throughout that day, the day is not restful in the way that I want.
We each have our own feelings towards all our various forms of technology, and I am not advocating one approach to navigating the relationships that we ourselves and our children have towards technology. But I am proposing that as we finish a week when our children enjoyed meaningful conversation and celebration of our trees, we might take a step back and use this shabbat, our day of rest, as a time to reflect on how we might make our lives more restful and more connected to our “roots”.
Shabbat shalom
Ilana
Ilana received her B.A. from Harvard College and a Master's Degree in Education from Bank Street College. She was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and now lives there with her husband and three children.
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