Parents trade technology for family time

Teresa McCarthy began to notice last year how much influence her iPhone had over her family.

She would text frequently or check Facebook updates as her daughters, age 5 and 2 1/2, would grab for the phone to play downloaded games. When she saw her eldest pretending to text, she decided enough was enough.

"I became more aware of just how much of a constant it had become in our lives," McCarthy, 36, of Long Beach, said.

As awareness increases about the distracting power of the phone and Internet, a growing number of parents, like McCarthy, are trying to set limits on their use.

She took Facebook off her mobile phone along with most other software applications, and put a password lock on it. She even tries to keep it "away from my actual person most of the time."

The former librarian has seen a positive effect. "I'm a less distracted parent," she said.

A caregiver pushing a stroller or supervising a toddler at the playground while immersed in a phone call or online activity is no longer an unusual sight. Nor is the image of a parent checking emails at children's sporting events or at the dinner table.

But now, "a sense that something is amiss" is how MIT professor Sherry Turkle describes the reaction she increasingly finds among those she interviews in her studies on the effects technology has on family and interpersonal relations.

In talking to families, she found child after child "complaining that their parents were distracted and had kind of checked out, and how much they missed them."

But in the past year, she's seen a change "happening relatively quickly," Turkle said.

Parents are starting to think about carving out "sacred spaces" for family time, she said, and asking her where to start.

Her mantra is "be reasonable." Placing limits doesn't mean never checking an email or making a call, but it could mean banning technology from the dinner table or the car, she said, and using playground time to be with your child.

"The child needs to know life happens and mothers are people too," she said. "But if you're at the playground, let's do child stuff."

Dana Friedman, president of the nonprofit Early Child Institute in Plainview, cautions that distracted parents are modeling behavior for their children "which is likely to come back to haunt them when they want their attention when they're older," as well as making them less focused on schoolwork and healthier active activities.

She suggests families audit the amount of time they spend with technology, discuss together when they should have technology-free family time, ban it from mealtime and try to limit the intrusion of work into family time.

For Viviana Russell, 39, of Westbury, a Town of North Hempstead councilwoman and the mother of three, the effort to keep the intrusions of work out of her family time is difficult.

Her children know that sometimes she has to answer her cellphone, but there are limits.

"When my daughter has a game, I absolutely don't pick up the phone. . . . I feel the tug, but this is family time," she said. "As a family, we've grown into knowing what works and what doesn't work."

Now, LEGO time with her younger son, 8, and bonding time with her daughter, 16, while shopping or driving in the car are seldom interrupted. But, she admitted, "It's really hard to keep those boundaries."

Alison La Ferlita, 36, McCarthy's neighbor in Long Beach, made it her New Year's resolution to try. She usually turns off her phone and limits electronic technology for her children, age 3 and 9 months, after her workday ends.

"You'd be shocked how a 9-month-old can navigate an iPad," La Ferlita said.

Her resolution isn't hard and fast. "If I'm at the park and my baby is sleeping and my 3-year-old is in my line of sight, I'll pick up a call from time to time."

But she is finding the quiet after-dinner hours "much more pleasurable when all the technology is off. It offers me and my husband an opportunity to interact with the children one on one."

Annemarie Milner Gordon, 36, of Bellport, said she chooses to not have a smartphone because she knows she'd be too tempted to use it when with her three children, ages 7, 5, and 2.

"I try to limit my kids," she said. "I've limited their media, and sort of limited their computers. I want them to be hands-on with things, and so that means I've had to limit myself as well."

But she can't have Facebook on a phone, she said, "because I know I would be checking it all the time and it would be too tempting."