A,,acted To Tech

11 over the country this
summer, you could hear
a plea of GenXer par-
ents to their Millennial
children that sounded
something like this: "Get
off your screen. Stop
playing Angry Birds. Go
outside and look at some real birdsf
Screen addiction is as real as that
YouTube video of a person walking
into a fountain in a shopping mall
because they had their head down in
their smart phone. Jane Brody, health
blogger for the New York Times dedi-
cates many posts to overuse of mobile
devices. In July, PBS aired the docu-
mentary Web Junkies, which followed
Chinese families taking the draconian
step of sending their gaming-obsessed
teens to a rehabilitation center not un-
like a center for drug addiction.
In 2010, a Kaiser Family Founda-
tion study concluded "the average 8 to
10-year-old spends nearly eight hours
a day with a variety of different media,
and older children and teenagers spend
more than 11 hours per day."

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46 September 20151

RED MUM

Tell your kids to put their screens down
and go outside and play.

By Stacy Gittleman

Excessive screen time is bad for a
child's physical health and mental well-
being. Childhood risks include obesity,
a rise in blood sugar, poor posture and
the inability to develop proper social-
ization skills.
GenXers, who are the last genera-
tion to talk to their friends through
a telephone lassoed to the kitchen
wall with a corkscrew cord, find
a chasm between themselves and
their Digital Age native children
wider and deeper than any other in
history.
Do we let our teens Skype in their
bedroom with members of the oppo-
site sex with the door closed? How do
we trust our children to independently
stay on task and complete their home-
work on their tablets, now a mainstay
school supply, when distractions are
only a click away?

WEANING AWAY
FROM THE SCREEN

The methods of curbing screen time
vary for each family. Some have short-
term experiments like kicking the
habit for a solid week. Others find that
observing Shabbat provides a weekly
refuge from every ping and tweet from
their mobile devices.
Whether they spent it in day camps
or overnight camp, hiking out West
or splashing in a neighborhood pool,
summertime is the perfect time to rein
in a child's screen habits and think
about ways to continue minimizing
screen time into the fall.
Brandon Solomon, 15, of West
Bloomfield says he uses technology "a
lot:' The rising Bloomfield Hills High
School sophomore plays video games
with his friends up to four hours daily,
either hanging out in person or over

the Internet. During the school year, he
keeps track of homework assignments
on his smartphone. Calling Facebook a
"bit old school," he prefers texting and
using social media platforms such as
Twitter and Instagram to stay in touch
with friends.
The day before a 35-day Tamarack
Camps Western travel program that
would take him and more than two
dozen area Jewish teens to hike, raft
and camp out in national parks like
Bryce, Zion and Yellowstone, his phone
broke.
"It was just as well because we
weren't allowed to take them along
anyway."
Between their treks out in the wild,
the teens traveled for long stretches at
a time by bus. Without their phones,
instead of texting to friends far away,
they were better able to get to know the
kids around them through old-fash-
ioned conversation. When they weren't
chatting, they read, looked out at the
passing landscape or just slept.
Now that he is back in civilization,
Solomon said he learned a lot about