The parents in Overland Park, Kan., were fed up. They wanted their children off screens, but they needed strength in numbers. First, because no one wants their kid to be the lone weird one without a phone. And second, because taking the phone away from a middle schooler is actually very, very tough.
“We start the meetings by saying, ‘This is hard, we’re in a new frontier, but who is going to help us?’” said Krista Boan, who is leading a Kansas City-based program called START, which stands for Stand Together And Rethink Technology. “We can’t call our moms about this one.”
I first noticed this gap almost a decade ago visiting college campuses. When I would sit in on classes at small private collegess students with laptops were a rare sight. At community colleges, they were slightly more common. At state universities, with amphitheater sized classrooms, they were all too common. Equally all too common was how many were all tuned to social media.
Dean’s List 