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Toronto Family Bans All Technology In Their Home Made After 1986
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Mary Am Shah reports in the Toronto Sun that 26-year-old Blair McMillan has banned any technology in his house post-1986, the year he and his girlfriend Morgan were born. They're doing it because their kids – Trey, 5, and Denton, 2 – wouldn't look up from their parents' iPhones and iPads long enough to kick a ball around the backyard. 'That's kind of when it hit me because I'm like, wow, when I was a kid, I lived outside,' says Blair adding that now 'we're parenting our kids the same way we were parented for a year just to see what it's like.' The McMillans do their banking in person instead of online. They develop rolls of film for $20 each instead of Instagramming their sons' antics. They recently traveled across the United States using paper maps and entertaining their screaming kids with coloring books and stickers, passing car after car with TVs embedded in the headrests and content infants seated in the back. Their plan is to continue living like it's 1986 until April 2014. Morgan, who admits she thought her boyfriend was 'crazy,' now devours books to pass the time and only uses a computer at work. 'I remember the day before we started this, I was a wreck and I was like I can't believe I have to delete my Facebook!' Blair originally experienced a form of phantom pain for the first few days after giving up his cellphone. 'The strangest thing without having a cellphone is that I could almost feel my pocket vibrating and I wanted to check my pocket.' Still Morgan says the change has been good for their family's spirit. 'We're just closer, there's more talking,'"
I was fishing with my 4year old today. We both catched a fish. He was more interested in the fish and the worms and the sea than any iPads or other post-1986 crap around.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
They actually have to go to the store and buy porn... instead of finding it for free on the internet.
Other than that, I think this is a great idea.
-hps
If they think that technology is bad for children then they should just become Amish. The truth is that the kids can play with a piece of string and be happy just as much as playing on a computer. If you give them string and a button, they could play inside all day with it. But if you give them the same thing and let them play outside with it, then they're good. Same with computers, they should just put the computers outside and the kids will be outside all the time. Sheesh, some parents don't even know how to be parents anymore.
Its interesting to see some of these people flip out completely instead of taking a moderate approach. Many modern technologies are very useful. When my kids at home ask me a question that I don't know the answer to, most of the time I can look it up on Wikipedia or another site. If my wife is going to the grocery store and I forget to tell her about something I need, I'll just text her and she'll pick it up. When I am picking up a friend or family member from the airport, it is a lot quicker to call them to coordinate the pick up time and stop than doing it the old way. The old way requires that you coordinate everything well in advance and nothing unexpected should happen to thwart your well conceived plans. And the list goes on.
If you don't want your kids using your tablets or phones, don't let them. I have no trouble letting my kids use the tablets and the phones. At the same time I don't let them play on them all day long. If they finish their homework and chores, they get some play time. And if they want to play a game on the tablet during their play time, well what is so wrong with that?
Only Mennonites do that any more.
there is a MRI at the local hospital and they can insert a tiny thingy into a blood vessel to remove it.
The hospital is not in their home. They can get an MRI. Not to mention MRIs were invented before 1986.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I never say stuff like this, but: if they really want to be more like a 1980s family maybe these parents of a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old should be married? ..wait, I just read more of TFA. They moved into their current house BECAUSE it was built in the 1980s? Jesus. The father has a mullet, and so the kids.
Oh come on, this is some kind of trolling lifestyle.
The more kids are raised using their own brains to entertain themselves rather than a gadget, the better.
I too am "like wow", but for a completely different set of reasons.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Only Mennonites do that any more.
You might be closer than you think to the ways cults are started.
Some borderline Luddite over bearing parent imposes a rule that if something was good enough for their parents its good enough for their children, and another oddball sect is born.
These are all fun thought experiments, and maybe some people want to try it out, but purposely crippling your children's education and ability to function in the world in which they will have to survive is something akin to child abuse if you ask me. The only good part about it is the child is sure to rebel, and the parent's cockamamie ideas will extinguish as soon as the kid leaves home.
On the other hand, there is always a risk that these mildly wacky ideas take on the mantle of religion.
The exhortation that Women should be modest grew to into the current belief that women should be chattel in the muslim world simply because someone in a position of religious authority said it should be so.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
When our kids were around 10 and 12 years old, we started observing a Sabbath.
Sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday: no electric lights, radios, TVs, and--especially--no computers.
We'd never observed a sabbath for any religions reason, but we decided to try this,
partly as an experiment, and partly as an attempt to reclaim our lives from electronic media.
The first time we did it, I expected the kids to go ballistic, but they pretty much rolled with it, and it became a regular part of our household.
It did change our rhythms and activities.
We would read or play (card, board, dice) games in the evening.
People went to sleep earlier.
We kept it up for a year or two.
I can't say exactly why we stopped.
The kids got older; life intervened.
I'm going to to this as well, but I'll wait for my kids to become adolescents first. It's just more fun that way!
Holy crap, dude it's only til next April. You need to chill WAY THE FUCK DOWN.
I mean an Amiga 1000 was a pretty kick ass bit of kit back then. I beg they hate going on holiday with a sack of tapes for the Walkman though.
I don't think they would allow pre 1986 nerd tech either.. that year is just a gimmick in their(his) plan. I would guess that you had cable pre 1986 so that's not an exactly new concept... and I can bet you he didn't go and fetch some old c64 if he even knows what one is(which gets us closer to the point that he probably believes such distractions didn't exist at all pre-1986). I mean - if they pick such a year.. are the aware of when the nintendo entertainment system was released? obviously, no, and if they do they sure as fuck aren't going to inform their kids about it. their "modern" problem isn't a modern problem at all.
I wonder how much their kids have started to spend time at their friends places.. would be pretty stupid to go on a roadtrip in a pre 1986 car without a cellphone as a backup too(it's a kia that's considerably newer..).
but for fucks sake the other kid IS FUCKING TWO YEARS OLD and the other one is FIVE - . and they go on an ultra ban on everything because they can't put the ipad on the top shelf - hell, I'd be proud if they could operate them, even iOS involves quite a bit of reading and even with familiar icons I bet the dad had to start the angry birds for the two year old one. they could have just bought them a ball.
as a conclusion I bet the guy didn't like friendly messages the wife was getting on facebook and wanted to do something ultra hipstery to fix that(being too stupid to understand that every woman with a picture gets friend requests from jafars, kinda like nigerian letters). because honestly they sound like they're from a national lampoon movie, but even they were a movie on it the kids wouldn't be 2 & 5 because those can't reach the top shelf. heck the kids won't even remember this experiment by the time they're 7 and 10.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I was only kidding! Everyone knows that the Mennonites are still using S100 bus machines.
They're doing it because their kids – Trey, 5, and Denton, 2 – wouldn't look up from their parents' iPhones and iPads long enough to kick a ball around the backyard. 'That's kind of when it hit me because I'm like, wow, when I was a kid, I lived outside,' says Blair adding that now 'we're parenting our kids the same way we were parented for a year just to see what it's like.' The McMillans do their banking in person instead of online.
I had an NES in 1986. My parents had the exact same concerns about my siblings and me playing video games instead of playing outside.
If anything, with mobile devices, now, people *can* go outside and still be connected to whatever they want.
Going to the bank takes away time that could be used to kick the ball around the back yard as well.
If these parents were having trouble getting their kids to go play outside, surely it would have been easier to force the kids to simply go play outside without their ipads than it was to transport their whole family back in time 30 years.
If you are nostalgic for 1986, then just say so. You don't need an incoherent justification to be different. "I thought it would be interesting", is a perfectly legitimate reason to do something.
It's even in the title of TFA: "Guelph family lives like it's 1986". Guelph is about 100km/60+mi. west of Toronto so isn't a suburb (it has its own university among other things.)
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
First off, the kids are not even in kindergarden yet (3 and 4 yr olds). They simply don't need electronics to teach them how to not interact with people, which is what these parents are doing. In fact, I'm quite happy to see a couple that's started taking back their lives from the continual interuptions of work and everyone else and actualy spending it with their children.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Can they still use the USENET using an IBM PC Compatible?
Well, you've inadvertantly raised an issue I've already commented on elsewhere. (*) Just because a technology existed or was theoretically available to people in 1986, doesn't mean it was likely that ordinary people would have it. The article states:-
“We’re parenting our kids the same way we were parented for a year just to see what it’s like,” Blair said.
For example, the issue I commented on was in response to someone saying that CDs existed in 1986. While this is true, they were still relatively expensive at the time- yuppies and audiophiles probably had one to play their copy of "Brothers in Arms" on, but Joe Average and his friends probably didn't. It would be another couple of years before they would start to take off in truly mass-market terms.
:-)
Mobile phones existed in 1986, but they were bloody expensive to both buy and use, so even if you could get a Motorola brick to work with a modern network, it wouldn't have been an item that most people would have had at the time.
The Commodore Amiga computer mentioned later in the thread came out in 1985, but the original A1000 was expensive (RRP US $1300 on its release, plus another $300 for the monitor- double those to account for inflation) so I doubt most people would have had one. (The more affordable Amiga 500 that was massively popular in Europe at the end of the decade wasn't available until 1987).
The USENET reference you made? Better-off households may have had IBM PC compatibles (at least in the US) and some may have had access to dial-up proprietary walled-garden online services, but Internet access was *not* common then. Most people hadn't even heard of it back then, and probably couldn't have afforded it if they had.
Er... can you spot a pattern here?!
The point I'm making is that if one simply wants to use technology that existed in 1986, then all these things and more qualify. But if one wants to represent the technological experience of an average person living at that time, then it's more questionable if they should be used.
(*) Nope, it's not a new story- sorry, folks!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
So, does this family use an average "PC clone" (e.g. the crappy and incompatible AT&T 6300) from the era, which would be a turbo XT with CGA graphics, or do they splurge and run the best 386 Compaq Deskpro with EGA graphics that they could find? (Of course, both computers now cost the same on the secondary market, while the Deskpro would have cost 10x as much as the XT in 1986...)
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
but for fucks sake the other kid IS FUCKING TWO YEARS OLD and the other one is FIVE - . and they go on an ultra ban on everything because they can't put the ipad on the top shelf - hell, I'd be proud if they could operate them, even iOS involves quite a bit of reading and even with familiar icons I bet the dad had to start the angry birds for the two year old one. they could have just bought them a ball.
You are severely underestimating 2 year olds. My daughter figured out how to unlock the iPad, page around until she found netflicks, open it, find Curios George in the recently watched list, and start it playing. And this was when she was 18 months old. And yes we had to sharply curtail her iPad time. She's supposed to be learning to explore her world physically at this age, not zone out in front of a screen.
We do still let her play for a few minutes a day because it is good for her to learn the tech, but too much screen time is IMHO counterproductive at her age. Besides after an iPad session she's always a huge grump.
Even an atheist would admit that it is humans which were responsible...
Y'know what caused a lot of those hard times in the first place? Religion.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
Ok but lots of houses had electronic devices in 1986. Maybe electronic typewriters, maybe crappy computers maybe but we had devices you could play games on and write documents on. Which specific device is secondary to the broader capabilities. You could sit around and play games or sit around and watch TV or sit around and write notes to people.
CDs
How are CDs any meaningfully different than a tape or record player in what you actually do with them? Even the radio is very similar. The details of what that specific device does are subtly different sure, but you sit around and listen to music. My mother still has a gramophone from like the great depression lying around. Audio quality on CD's is way better, but you can sit around and listen to a gramophone just as well as you can sit around listening to a CD.
Mobile phones
No, but we had phones, and cordless phones. Sure, you had to call my office number rather than my mobile to tell me to fetch milk on the way home, but you could still do it. Mobile phones haven't actually changed that people stand around talking on the phone. They just mean everyone has their own and can be called everywhere rather than having to plan ahead.
But if one wants to represent the technological experience of an average person living at that time, then it's more questionable if they should be used.
Well so that's the thing. The technological experience from the proliferation of the internet and the WWW might have changed things a little bit, but in 1986 people still sat around and listened to music, played games on electronic devices and listened to music. The average technological experience today is not hugely different from in 1986 for most people. Whether you sat around watching ALF,Matlock and LA law and Oprah, or Futurama, Breaking bad, Law and Order and.. Oprah (or ellen now?) you're still sitting around watching TV. Whether you sat around writing letters by hand, typing them on a typewriter or writing e-mails you still sat around writing. Whether you sat and read the newspaper, or go to the newspaper's website and read there you still basically conducted the same activity. Technology has made all of those things marginally more convenient and marginally higher quality. But you did basically the same stuff.
Certainly kids spend more time on the internet talking and playing games with their friends than they did running around in the yard with them in 1986, but it's still time interacting with friends, and less time for mom and dad to drive the kids around.
I think it's a serious mistake to think the allocation of time between work - eating - goofing off is radically different, or that the time spent goofing off is meaningfully different today than in 1986. Whether you went to an arcade, owned a NES (or atari 2600 or similar) you're still sitting in front of some device playing video games. Whether you stream your TV through netflix or watch it through a cable company you're still watching TV. Whether you are wired to a phone or have a mobile with your own number people still call you and won't shut up.
Sure, when you can't chat with your friends sure, you talk to your spouse - but that's a bad thing too, because now your friends are going to move past you. It's like that guy in 1986 who didn't have a phone. And yes, there were those people too. You mean I can't call you you and invite you to an event, I *have* to ask you at work or send you a letter? I'll ask the person I can actually call.
1926 maybe, sure, times were different. But I lived through 1986, and people sat around listening to music, reading, watching TV and playing games the same way they do today. Sure, the format has shifted a bit, but it's the same basic activity.
Lot's of people think that marriage is important and worthwhile for reasons completely irrelevant to your pitifully naive play-pretend analysis.
Things like "commitment", for example, are awful important to people in "any personal relationship".
The popularity of marriage does not in any way indicate that we're losing our right and freedoms. It's not the governments fault that the biggest commitment you've ever made to a "relationship" is deciding to pay by the minute or by the hour.
Required reading for internet skeptics
While mobile phones probably refers to texting and different apps more than calling, it seems they conveniently left TV as an option. I didn't see anything about limiting themselves to only TV channels/shows available in 1986. This could easily just push the kids off the computer onto the couch in front of the TV
The first step is admitting you have a problem, seriously. Child abuse because the kids don't have an iPad? Now you're insulting children who are really abused. There are millions of people in this country right now who function daily without cell phones or even yes the internet.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
but purposely crippling your children's education and ability to function in the world in which they will have to survive is something akin to child abuse if you ask me.
This is an absolute trivialization of the negative effects of actual child abuse. You think that it's a bad method of parenting -- fine. But trying to equate it to abuse is laughable.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Marriage is, among other things, symbolic. It means a great deal to many people, and denigrating it is shallow.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
So that you can look through it when you are preparing to be a jackass and critique someone's spelling to make sure you are right. While catched is not standard modern English usage, it is valid and is seen in certain dialects.
Or you could just, you know, not be a jackass and try to make yourself look smart by attacking the form rather than the message. People fuck up in their written and spoken word all the time, particularly on an informal forum like Slashdot. Attacking that because you don't like the message is stupid. Let it go.
Goes double because you never know, the person making a post may not speak English as their primary, or even secondary, language. The Internet is international. Their understanding of the language may be incorrect and incomplete, but that does not mean that their ideas have less merit.
However, in this case, the joke's on you. Like I said, buy yourself a copy of the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary or Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. You'll find catched in there. It isn't modern usage, I wouldn't teach it in an English class, but it is allowable and correcting someone, particularly someone online, is rather silly.
A year at their age won't impede their ability to learn how to use 21st century devices in the slightest. They won't suffer a damn thing, and it certainly won't deny them access to a certain career path. The above is complete hyperbole and is completely out of touch with reality.
I find the responses from the slashdot crowd telling. While a few people expressed some support, most seemed horrified. That's quite comical, and more than a bit disturbing. It tells me that many slashdot readers have a problem with too much technology, in the same sense as some people have a problem with too much alcohol. Those people would be wise to spend more time outdoors surrounded by greenery, read more books, and turn off their phones for a few weeks every now and then. If the prospect of turning off your phone for a week disturbs you that's a great indicator that you have a problem.
Not parents. Good parenting requires walking a middle path where you are kind, protective, and providing to your children but not overly permissive or accommodating. It is not the easiest thing to do. So bad parents, and there are many, fall to one extreme. They either tend to be overly authoritarian, expecting that their needs and demands are primary and children are to do as they are told, no matter what, and often using violence to get their way, or just as a release of anger. Or they are overly permissive, they want to be friends with their kids, they will let them do pretty much whatever they want, even when they know it is bad, will acquiesce to all demands, give in to tantrums, and so on.
Either style of bad parenting is easier than good parenting, and so you see plenty of both.
It strikes me that the parents in the article are of the permissive kind of bad parents, combined with a fair bit of narcissism. They want their kids to be their friends, they don't want to be parents, and they want their kids to give them affection and attention. So when electronics were competing, their solution wasn't to put limits on it, but rather to just banish it all. That way they weren't being the bad guys since "everyone" including them had the same restrictions.
My first thought when I read this was "That's a good idea, really" - not because I am against modern technology, but they have challenged themselves in a way, and found that it gives them something of real value.
I don't quite know if I find it amusing or shocking to see the sort of reactions here, even to the extremes of declaring that this is child abuse and an impending, national emergency. Really, you sound like a bunch of old prudes upon discovering that their teenage granddaughter as uncovered her ankle in public. What's up with you guys? Scared of the very thought that these people might be right, and you ought to put down your wankGadget and go into the big room with the blue ceiling?
Going outside, getting exercise, feeling the wind, sunshine and rain, meeting people and generally challenging yourself physically, socially and mentally are all good for you. You even become a better coder if you are not glued to the internet socket all day long. You will have more energy, you will feel less depressed.
I think we should applaud these guys - the internet and modern technology are good tools, but they are TOOLS. They shouldn't fill your whole life any more than a hammer or a frying pan.
Looks like everyone's a parent here.
Fuck, I for one, am happy people are taking different approaches to education. It results in the diversity of minds a sane society needs.
The bottom line is, concerned parents will have successful children, so it's all good.
For example, the issue I commented on was in response to someone saying that CDs existed in 1986. While this is true, they were still relatively expensive at the time- yuppies and audiophiles probably had one to play their copy of "Brothers in Arms" on, but Joe Average and his friends probably didn't. It would be another couple of years before they would start to take off in truly mass-market terms.
I got my first CD-player in 1984 (a Philips CD100 - http://www.audioscope.net/images/philipscd1005.jpg) - I was 18 at the time - and within a year my first shelf of CDs were filled. In 1986 I had around 150 CDs, including "Brothers In Arms" by the way. Today I have something like 5.500+ CDs, most of which has been ripped (FLAC) and I almost exclusively plays the rips only.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
My 2 year old loves playing with tablets, phones, computers, electronic toys, etc. I have to admit I sometimes worry about that a bit. On the one hand i feel that it's actually good - she'll need those skills in her future - and i'm proud that those little fingers already know how to navigate user interfaces. She's learning words and pictures from playing simple games and toddler apps. On the other hand, i worry that stuff is overstimulating - bright colors, music, sounds, pictures of cute little animals - like candy wrappers, made to attract kids to something unhealthy, and addictive. Also, most apps are very limited and repetitive, not engaging a child's creativity.
But then, what do i do when I've got some free time? I sit behind my computer, or in front of the tv, mostly. And kids imitate what their parents do. Also I have to admit I do find it convenient to have my hand free when she's focused on a led screen.
Fortunately, my little girl also loves to go outside. If I leave her with the tablet, she'll get bored after a while and will want to do something else. She'll come to me and drag me outside.
So, if your kid spends a lot of time playing with electronic toys, it's probably because they're imitating you. You want you kid to do more creative stuff, art & crafts, do it yourself! Do the dishes by hand, and they'll want to help out. Kids can moderate themselves, but they don't want to do what you want them to do when you want them to. Sometimes you'll need to force them to do things, but try to avoid it. Instead, be ready to join in their activities. So if your child wants to go outside in the rain, put on your boots and go stamp in some puddles together. Technology may be a bit additive (not immune myself) but making it illegal will only make it more attractive. Let technology work for you, let them learn from it, and enjoy it, while you can do something else, or join in the fun. Your kid will get bored with it after a while, and then you need to be ready to offer alternatives.
assignment != equality != identity
Except that when he was 5 years old (the age of his oldest kid) it was 1991. The game-boy was out, cassettes were common place, many houses would have ataris or similar.
There's nothing wrong with doing what they are doing but it seems very strange to me to try and live in some arbitrary time period; if anything it sounds more like it is being done because the parents want to and for novelty than anything else. I bet they won't be turning down any medical advances since the mid-1980s should the need arise and I wonder whether they have given up on all appliances and home comforts that have improved since then. Was the car they used to navigate by map also missing any of the advancements in car tech since then? Somehow I doubt it.
Even an atheist would admit that it is humans which were responsible...
Of course its humans that are responsible. It's the religious types that would say their particular invisible friend is the one ultimately responsible.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
When I was growing up in the 80s, being the only kid without a Walkman and NES made me the "poor loser kid" on the block
Sometimes on Slashdot it seems like if you didn't have a C64/Amiga, and a shell account on the Unix machine at your Dad's workplace in the 80's, you were a "poor loser kid"
My nieces (12 and 4) each have their own tablet, and the older one has a new computer, Xbox 360, TV bigger than ours, her own cellphone, and no less than three portable gaming consoles.
That kid is definitely spoiled and anyone who heaps that much tech on a developing mind is just asking for trouble.
Ho-yea.
I was at my sister-in-law's house the other day, and her 4-year-old was bemoaning the "fact" that since his little brother was using their shared tablet, he literally had absolutely nothing at all to do. No, bemoaning isn't the right way to say it... throwing an absolute shit-fit. Yea, that's more accurate.
I glanced at the huge trampoline in their yard (which also happens to be filled with toys) sitting all alone on a beautiful, sunny day, and just shook my head.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Something does not have to be physical to be considered abuse.
And delaying your five-year-old from learning to use an iPad for 6 months still doesn't qualify as anything remotely abusive. If it does, then I'm the world's worst parent for not letting my daughter have a meal consisting entirely of ketchup.
I am not a crackpot.