thomas Kersting - Disconnected: How to Protect Your Kids from the Harmful Effects of Device Dependency

I was a helmetless, Big Wheelriding child of the 1980s. I walked a half mile in the dark to the bus stop each morning, faced the occasional bully, threw eggs at other kids on Halloween, and rode my Huffy all around town when I was ten. I played tackle football with no pads and baseball without a heart protector. I sat in the back seat of my moms Ford Granada without wearing a seat belt. I was outside all day long in the summer along with the other kids in my neighborhood. Nothing was planned out for us, and the only thing we cared about was adventure. We had Ataris and Nintendos but spent much less time playing them than we did playing outside with each other. Handheld devices did not exist, so my friends and I were never distracted from the fun we had together. When it was time for dinner, we were home on time and ate with our familiesevery night. We had few worries and were just, well, kids. And we all survived.

Today, my greatest source of pride is fatherhood. It is the most rewarding thing in the world but also the most frightening. The world I once lived in as a child is much different from the one my children live in today. In many ways this is a good thing. My kids always wear their seatbelts, never get on their bikes without a helmet, and do not throw eggs at other kids on Halloween. Yet the dangers you and I faced as children pale in comparison to the one our kids are facing. This danger is changing the very meaning of what it means to be a kid and even what it means to be a humanand this danger is wounding our childrens mental, emotional, and social health like nothing weve seen before.

Several years ago my family and I enjoyed a wonderful trip out West. We visited a number of national parks including Yellowstone, Bryce Canyon, and Zion. It was the vacation of a lifetime. The flight back home to LaGuardia Airport in New York was long, and I remember feeling eager to exit the plane, get through baggage claim, and arrive home. When we finally disembarked and started making our way through the terminal, I stopped in my tracks. I felt like I had just entered the Twilight Zone. Screens were everywhere, and not just in the palms of the people I passed. Flashing tablets loaded with social media apps and games were perfectly positioned in front of every barstool and restaurant seat. Ive spent a fair amount of my life in airports, and Id met people from all around the world and learned so much while sipping a beer from one of those stools. The airport had replaced these experiences with machines. At the time of our trip, I had been speaking for several years to parent groups about the negative effect that too much technology was having on our childrens well-being, so I was ahead of the curve, but this experience was differentthis was technology on steroids.

As our family continued our long walk to the baggage claim area, I felt helpless. I hoped that what I witnessed was an isolated case, limited to the terminal we had flown into, but it wasnt. As we walked past more restaurants, bars, and waiting areas, the scene was the samenearly everyone was connected to a screen and disconnected from each other. Strangers remained strangers.

Although I was reaching a lot of people through lectures, counseling sessions, and television appearances, I knew I had to do more to help parents understand the challenges their children will face in our hyperconnected world. That is why I wrote this book. It is a call to action.