Our Great City

Submitted by: Lois Frazier - Monart School of Art - 817-993-1374

Are you fostering a disengagement in your children? In our stressed lives, it takes little effort to give in to the “wants” versus “needs” of our children. Have you noticed everyone seems to be plugged into something whether that be a cell phone to their ear or a gaming device in their hands, or spend their free time watching movies? What has happened to conversation and connecting to others?

Those same kids who scream for the latest video gaming system or hand-held device are feeding an inner beast that is demanding to be fed. Everything is faster, brighter and seems to process our brains in a need-more kind of way. It doesn’t give your brain a chance to slow down, truly process and problem solve in a growing manner. We are building a generation of people who consider a conversation with a stranger a foreign concept and something to be abhord. Can you teen sit and talk to you during dinner or do they have to have their cell phone at the ready?

We give into the demands of our children by giving that cell phone earlier and earlier, stating “it’s for safety and so that I can get ahold of them.” But, truly, it goes back to that “need” versus “wants” element. Do you set parameters for usage? Or, are they texting after 9:00pm and calling at all hours?

Here’s a warning parents, these same kids who disengage on a regular basis don’t know how to relate to adults in the real world. And, isn’t it your job as a parent to help your children become self-sufficient, or will they be living at home at 30 because they can’t socialize and keep a job? Can your child go on a job interview and look the interviewer in the eye? Will they be able to sit in a meeting in the corporate world without feeding that inner beast? If you have a steady diet of stimulation that is electronic-based and cursatory instead of a balance of interaction, physical activity, quiet time, and creative stimulation you are feeding disengagement. Fill your mind with creativity and it wants more creativity. Fill it with mind-numbing electronics and it wants more. It’s that simple.

I can hear my Mom saying, “Go read a book, I’m not your entertainment committee,” when I told her I was bored. Things have changed these days and now the conversation with parent and child is more like this. I was surprised by a comment my step daughter recently said when I asked her how her trip to Six Flags went. “It was so boring I almost died,” she said. “everyone had their DS on the bus and I had no one who would talk to me.” She couldn’t handle the thirty-minute bus ride without that stimulation in hand.

An option that many families do not even think of is to simply cut down on the number of electronics in the household. If every member of the family has their own everything, than no one learns to share, or has to interact with anyone else in the home, this can limit the social health of the family as a group, as well as the social health and skills of the individual members of the family.

By cutting down on the amount of solitaire activities that each member in the home has to choose from, it will give each member in the home, one more opportunity to interact with each other.

• Limit the time allowed for electronic gaming.
• Limit the time for personal cell phone usage and texting.
• Disallow cell phones during family activities and dinner.
• Check your student’s cell activities and texting – violations are cause for de-activation.
• Limit the time of solitary activities your student has.

Let your children reach their full potential. Set parameters and stick to them. 

A cell phone is a “want”, it’s not a “need”. Don’t be a parent watching their child graduate from high school who has no direction in life because it’s easier for them to disengage and sit on the sofa then go get a job. Their comfort zone it’s out in the real world, it’s somewhere lost in “electronic’s land”. Or, you could find yourself shaking your head and wondering what happened to that kid and how did they become so lost and alone. You gave them everything they wanted.