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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
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.
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.
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!
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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.
Actually, the Amish beliefs fundamentally aren't about technology - it's based on a very literal interpretation of a biblical command to "not yoke oneself under the non-believers", which they believe puts them at risk for being forced to abandon their faith. They use electricity, but because buying power off the grid would break that command, they run them off generators (under the theory that the electric lines could be cut off at any time, but generator fuel can be stockpiled). Likewise, they cannot own phones, but they found a loophole there as well - have public pay phones installed, with extra-loud ringers. This way they can pay straight-up for each call. Similarly, they do not rent land (except maybe from each other).
They follow all their rules this way. Remember that bit about "give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's"? Even though they do not use nearly any social services like public schooling, they pay all their taxes, even many that they could technically opt out of (I think they do refuse Social Security taxes, legally, but they pay all the others). And for their strictures against military clothing? They consider buttons to be military wear - all their clothes use ties (or perhaps nowadays zippers or snaps). Although they do seek out loopholes - their beliefs forbid purely decorative pictures, so they tend to have numerous calenders, which, because they serve a functional purpose as well as have decorative imagery, are perfectly fine.
Sure, there probably are plenty of Amish who think technology itself is bad, or the whole nature thing. They're a varied culture, not completely uniform. But the core reason for it is based on some odd religious interpretation, not beliefs about technology itself.