How parents can set limits on tech use
Katherine Martinko: Day 2 of The ElectroHealth Summit
“The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.”
~ Fred Astaire
One of the privileges I didn’t have as a child was the ability to watch Saturday morning cartoons. I’d be carted off to Ukrainian school instead, which was located in an area of Newark NJ, where our lectures would often get drowned out by the sirens of carjacked automobiles. Then there were the pimply-faced bullies, teenagers that were years older than I, who would rough me up just to get a laugh. My Saturday adventures ended in an anticlimax, as I’d come home, looking forward to potentially seeing a re-run, or maybe even a VHS recording of Garfield - only to find that the tape had been erased and replaced with a soap opera. “I never liked that dumb orange cat anyway” is what I told my child self. Indeed, my instinct may have been right to not like those cartoons, as the colors of the real world were much more palpable to behold.
Life’s experiences pruned my future for new growth faster than any “educational” children’s programming. Mr. Rogers could never compare to the lessons I learned buying candy on Martin Luther King Blvd. Along with Saturday school, I was also thrust headlong into the Ukrainian community, which included weekly scout meetings and summer camps. I would go on to meet hundreds of incredible human beings, some of which I have as friends to this very day.
If it weren’t for these experiences, I honestly don’t know where I would be today. Maybe watching Monday Night Football and the Bachelor as I stuff my middle-aged crisis down with Doritos? I’d rather read War & Peace and complain about the banality of evil through orange-colored glasses instead.
Like many of our readers, I was born before the internet, so my life was full of a lot more emotional vibration than the wireless frequency most of our children are constantly exposed to today. If you’re reading this, and you were born after 1994, then we commend you! You may just be entering college and considering what the “real world” is all about. I don’t have to tell you - all you need to do is close your eyes, listen to sounds of nature, cars whizzing past, the breeze, the smell in the air that’s hopefully pleasant, and you already know what’s real. Real is the sense of being able to experience all those emotions, sights and sounds, but still feel centered enough to not get caught up in their frequency. In a sense - real is reflection.
Today many children aren’t afforded the opportunity to have this critical pause, to reflect, and dare I say, experience boredom. Today we’re thrusting ourselves face down not into the unknown world, but into the known abyss of social media and blue-lit screens. Many of us feel overwhelmed, as if we’re powerless to change the oncoming tide of artificial intelligence, or the devices that swirl around us like a dystopian tsunami. Yet there is so much we can do by, well…doing things.
Most disease is driven by our environment, as the study of epigenetics is revealing. In order to become healthier, we need to shift what’s in our immediate vicinity. For instance, instead of looking at a screen when we wake up, we can gaze out into the Big Screen of the Sunrise first thing. Instead of leaving phones scattered on the kitchen table, we can put them in their place - in another room, where they’re out of sight, out of mind.
There are many more practical things that we can do to create a healthier living space, which we discussed recently with one of our guests during The ElectroHealth Summit! We had the honor of interviewing Katherine Johnson Martinko, author of Childhood Unplugged, who laid out how she establishes healthier boundaries around technology for herself and her family.
Here’s what we discussed:
How Katherine navigates technology in the home
Practical strategies for mindful tech use
Katherine’s philosophy on how to set rules around technology
Community support and resources for parents
What grandparents can do to set better tech boundaries
Here’s part of our interview:
You can watch our entire interview when you get The ElectroHealth Summit. When you access the Summit, you’ll also be able to download any interview as an audio or video file that you can then watch anytime, anywhere, on airplane mode.
Lifetime access to The ElectroHealth Summit is available for a limited time discount until this Friday, April 4th:
Thanks for taking the time to learn how you can disconnect from the artificial world, and plug into the real one. Life doesn’t get a re-run - it’s live.
We are more powerful than we know,
Roman & Bohdanna
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Thanks for this great chat, Roman and Bohdanna!