As I type these lines, my daughter, Harriet, who is 14, is on her iPhone skipping among no fewer than eight social media sites. My son, Penn, who is 15, will be asleep for hours yet. He was
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all night with a friend playing two video games, in a jag fueled by his favorite foodlike
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.
I like that my kids are comfortable and alert in the wired world. But increasingly I am
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for them. It"s more
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every day that screens have gradually stolen them from themselves. My wife, Cree, and I have
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them to drift quite distantly into the online world, and we fear our casualness has been a
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.
Each summer Cree and I resolve to
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things back. This is
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we draft rules for a new school year, strictures like: no laptops in bedrooms during the week; homework before screen time; no electronics after 10 p.m.. These rules invariably begin to
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by Day 3. By Day 4, there is pleading, and the discreet slamming of doors. By Day 8, no one is sure what the
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are anymore. We"re back where we started, and plump with fear.
This year it
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to me we needed help. So I sat down with a new book that
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assistance, and understanding. It is
The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age,
whose primary
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, Catherine Steiner-Adair, is a clinical psychologist who teaches at Harvard Medical School. Her book is
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on thousands of interviews, and it can be eloquent about the need to ration our children"s computer time. Here the author has pinned me. I like to think I"m a good father, perhaps even casually
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in my better moments,
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there is zero doubt that, without my iPhone in my palm, I feel I lose something since I"m fairly
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. I must change my life a bit.
Cree and I are still hammering out our kids" computer rules. We are trying to
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in mind that we"re not our kids" best friends; we"re their
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. And we are
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if there"s an app for fortitude.