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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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
Or you could, you know, not be an idiot and realize that I was attacking the message. The message is that their kids don't need technology; they'd do just as well fishing with dad. It was a stupid message at best.
That wasn't the message I got from the post... the message I read out of it was that if parents spent more time being, you know, parents, then kids wouldn't need to substitute electronic gadgets for them. The rise of kids using electronic toys is not new... I know people who were raised by their nintendos in the 1980's, and the Simpsons was making jokes about the kids being raised by the TV 20 years ago. The solution isn't to throw the technology out the window, though, it's to be a more involved parent, and it always has been.