Say Hello to Digital Detox Day
Underscoring the belief that it is best to lead by example, Charles Soriano, the principal of the East Hampton Middle School, suggested a face-to-face get-together rather than a phone conversation or via email.
“Let’s have a no-device meeting,” he said.
Together with parents and faculty, Dr. Soriano is planning a “Friends and Family First” initiative at the school, to be held on a Saturday in May, inviting students and parents to unplug and go device-free during waking hours.
“It is strictly voluntary,” he said. “An experiment, really, to take a break from digital life, from technology — to help our middle schoolers create mindfulness about how electronics like phones, computers, and game consoles influence their behavior.”
Those wishing to participate in the device-free Saturday will be required to sign a pledge, promising to adhere to the rules of cyber restraint. Parents will co-sign. And, parents wishing to participate in solidarity, or simply in recognition that device addiction afflicts adults too, will need to get their children to co-sign for them, with the little ones promising to keep an eye on the adults. In a show of support for the idea, local businesses including Mary’s Marvelous, Khanh Sports, and Gurney’s Resort have donated prizes for middle schoolers and parents who log the most hours free of devices.
Dr. Soriano knows a day of digital detox will not be easy. In an email announcing the idea to the middle school community (the date is yet to be determined), the principal wrote, “This day will be hard for some, easier for others (. . . like cutting off a limb for still others), but we need to start somewhere.”
According to Dr. Soriano, who has been at the school’s helm for almost five years, middle schoolers, mostly between 11 and 14, naturally struggle with executive function, in-person communication, and decision-making. “Put a smartphone in their hands and you’ve got the prefect storm for things to go very wrong,” he said.
He estimates approximately 80 percent of East Hampton’s sixth graders have cellphones and are linked to social media. Unlike the days of his own childhood, he said, when hurled insults simply evaporated, today’s affronts are encoded in text, which goads youngsters in to a game of one-upmanship often escalating rapidly to a nuclear level.
It is not solely about the dangers of social media that prompted this discussion and the idea of a device-free Saturday, but the increasing number of hours tweens and teens are spending in front of a screen. Dr. Soriano, echoing many experts, believes that the hours per day that kids spend tethered to apps like Instagram and Snapchat are crowding out face-to-face experiences.
In a recent New York Times column headed “Resist the Internet,” Ross Douthat wrote that today’s generation is “enslaved to the internet.”
“Your day-to-day, minute-to-minute existence is dominated by a compulsion to check email and Twitter and Facebook and Instagram with a frequency that bears no relationship to any communicative need,” he fumed.
East Hampton is not the only East End school grappling with the issue. At the Ross School, Nick Kardaras, a parent of elementary school children, will speak to the community about his recent book called “Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids — and How to Break the Trance.” Mr. Kardaras will share his research and findings at Ross on April 27 from 6:30 to 8 p.m.
Perhaps it’s the beginning of a movement, Dr. Soriano said. Mr. Douthat hopes so, too. “Only a movement can save you from the tyrant in your pocket,” he wrote.