In December, I confiscated my teenage son’s iPhone (and gave him a flip phone to use for emergencies) until school ended for the calendar year. Also, I required him to stay home in the evenings during the same period. My goal was to give him a deliberate pause to allow him to rest, to focus on school, and to spend some time with family leading up to the holidays.
I am pleased to report that all objectives were met. Notably, he surprised himself by enjoying a Christmas infused Cirque de la Symphonie performance along with his parents and grandparents. Also, I taught him the basics of pickleball. His introduction to pickleball was sort of the blind leading the blind, but he caught on well enough. Most importantly, he really likes the game, and we have played several times since.
Pickleball is a wonderful father-son activity because it is readily available and quickly provides high levels of enjoyment in compressed timeframes at little cost. This new activity for us, alone, made the deliberate pause worth it.
Also, during the deliberate pause, my son played computer games more often and even watched some television. In my day, such activities would have been the ones from which I would have had to take a deliberate pause. However, in these days of endless iPhone scrolling, computer games and TV are quaint and welcome alternatives.
Of course, he focused more on school during the deliberate pause–the main driver of the exercise.
Now my son is on holiday break and is out with his friends more often than he is with us, iPhone in hand. That’s okay. Actually, we are thrilled that he has made a ton of new friends so quickly after transitioning to a new high school in another town thirty minutes away! After break ends, though, we’ll need to find a balance between La Vida iPhone and La Vida flip phone!
With Love,
P. Gustav Mueller, author of The Present