The Winter of Our Disconnect (31 page)

Admittedly, we were coming off a pretty low base. I would definitely have put up my hand along with the 40 percent of Australian mothers who find mealtimes unpleasant AND the 67 percent who believe they are good for us anyhow. Most nights, I’d put a fair amount of effort into preparing a meal. Nothing lavish—like most teenagers, mine are allergic to lavish—but in the main nutritious, balanced, and quasi-palatable. When they were little, I scurried around making special child-friendly dinners. In fact, our nightly fare was not unlike the Kidz Menu at a down-market family restaurant: i.e., heavy on the chicken nuggets and carrot sticks, light on the line-caught trout and mushroom rillettes. These days, the experts tell you this is exactly what you shouldn’t do. Children should be offered adult food from the git-go, and if they don’t like it, let ’em eat multigrain bread.

But I have to say, though my kids’ palates were definitely stunted, not having to engage in force feeding meant that most of the time I enjoyed our meals together. Still, as the children got older, I did begin to worry. Would they reach adulthood squirting ketchup like crack-crazed graffiti artists and removing the “crust” from their fish sticks on grounds of “spiciness”? Somehow or other, they eventually moved on. Today they are able to enjoy most foods, with one or two limitations. Anni doesn’t like meat. Bill doesn’t like vegetables. And Sussy isn’t really into cutting things up, or for that matter chewing. But hey. You can’t have your Thai fishcake and eat it, too.

Going into The Experiment, my main concerns about our family mealtimes were: first, low appetites on account of the ridiculous amount of after-school snacking (sorry, “grazing”) going on, most of it in front of a screen; and, second, speed-eating. The latter was a term I learned much later, in doing the research for this book. It was a relief to find there was an actual word to describe the practice that had been poisoning the ambience at our family meals, like an over-boiled head of cabbage, for years.

“We define speed-eating as a fast rate of movement or action when young people put food into the mouth, chew and swallow, in order to finish their food as fast as possible. This can be interpreted as an attempt to escape from parental and teacher control at mealtimes,” I read in an article exploring “the realm of food consumption practices as a political arena.”
¹⁰
My kids were demon speed-eaters, but I interpreted it more as an attempt to escape back to messaging, Facebook, and Dune.

The Experiment proved this to be a very powerful hypothesis.

With no more attractive prospect to lure them from the dinner table, the children did not exactly learn to linger over cigars and brandy. But at least they stopped inhaling their food and bolting for the nearest digital foxhole. We did slow down, all of us, and, over time, we did engage in more meaningful dinnertime dialogue. But then, given our prevailing standard—“So how was school?” “What?” or “Why aren’t you eating your peas?” “What?” or “What’s the deal with the Carbon Trading Scheme?” “Who?”—that wasn’t hard. Overall, I would estimate that we probably increased our face time at the dinner table by 15 to 20 percent, in both quantity and quality. That was pretty good, I guess—but still less than I’d expected. I’d pictured us like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, engaging in spirited but civilized debate, our faces aglow with family feeling and an excess of giblet gravy. The truth was, we were still more likely to bicker over who got the Hannah Montana glass.

There were unexpected gains elsewhere on the bill of fare. Deprived of his early-morning downloads, Bill started spending more time at the breakfast table. He didn’t initiate a lot of conversation. But he did eat a lot more eggs, and spent an impressive amount of time reading the sports pages. I’m not sure it improved family communication, but it made me smile to see him tented importantly behind the pages of
The Australian
, like somebody’s father. Sussy, too, eventually started to make unscheduled appearances at the breakfast table. “Do you want oatmeal?” I’d ask. “Eggs? Toast? Juice? A smoothie?”

“No, thanks,” she’d croak gruffly, gulping her tea. Then I’d serve whatever it was I was making for Bill, anyway, and she’d eat every bite. It was sort of the opposite of demand feeding—more supply feeding, really—and I wished I’d started it fourteen years earlier.

At the most basic level, The Experiment forced us to notice food more—just as we noticed music more, and sleep, and each other. Before, eating had been a side dish. Now it was the main course, or at least one of them.

Our approach to cooking changed too, especially for the girls. They’d started out as reasonably competent cooks, but by the end of The Experiment they were capable of turning out entire meals with ease. More important, they
wanted
to. Bill, alas, responded by growing even lazier in the kitchen. This was especially true once he got a job and enough pocket money to supply his bubble-tea habit. On the other hand, The Experiment did ignite his interest in the barbecue, in the true, albeit slightly cringeworthy tradition of the Aussie male.

Our shopping habits morphed in intriguing and unanticipated ways too. Before, I’d often shopped for groceries here and there, dashing up to the supermarket or deli on a need-to-nosh basis. Now, the Saturday morning shopping trip became an essential weekend ritual. Pre-Experiment, I’d always shopped alone. Now Anni came with me, eager to help plan meals and to steer me tactfully toward more adventurous choices of yogurt and cookies. (I am the sort of person who can, and in fact has, eaten the same brand of chocolate chips for twenty-three years.)

Once the reality of the global economic downturn started to bite, we determined to become better recession shoppers, and the child who once told me she’d “never actually been hungry” even got interested in planning meals. The chore of shopping for a family became more palatable, less of a burden and more an event—even an opportunity to bond. It also made me aware of how incredibly rigid my grocery choices had become. I found myself taking daring steps. Buying dishwashing liquid with the passion fruit scent, or paper towels stamped with
different
unidentifiable pictures. And who could forget the egg-ring incident?

“Wow. Egg rings! I’ve always wanted egg rings!” I sighed as we passed a display in the kitchen gadgetry aisle.

“You say that like it’s some impossible dream, Mum. They’re two ninety-five, for crying out loud. Just buy them.”

The lunacy of it all cracked us up. By the time I had the strength to reach out and take a packet, our faces were streaked with mascara and shoppers were giving us a wide berth. For the next week, we enjoyed a festival of unnaturally round fried eggs. It was as I’d always imagined. They
do
taste better.

As our overall rate of blobbiness declined—in our eating habits, in our eggs—we also started to firm up the boundaries between night and day, sleeping and wakefulness. At the outset, giving up the 24/7 lifestyle that had featured cruising for eBay bargains at midnight, posting status updates at four a.m., and sleeping with phones under our pillows “just in case” (of what? falling finally into REM sleep?) was a rude awakening for the whole family. Yet it soon became apparent that the less we used our technology to “chill,” the more rest and sleep we enjoyed. For me, that was a real wake-up call.

It’s not as if I didn’t know that sleep was important to the way we function. The dawn of every day brings a new study about the dangers of “sleep debt.” Like most educated parents, I was well aware of the alarming [
sic
] evidence that most of us are getting far less sleep than experts tell us we need. It was the direct link we experienced between sleep (or lack thereof) and technology (or lack thereof) that started to sound in my head like a gong. In fact, plugging back into our diurnal rhythms—getting more and better sleep each night—arguably had a greater impact on the quality of our lives and relationships than any other single factor during The Experiment.

In Sussy’s case, “sleep debt” was too weak a phrase. “Sleep bankruptcy” was more like it. When she’d started fifth grade at a pricey private school—think tartan pleats and hair-extension-destroying berets—and received her own MacBook as part of the school’s laptop program, I’d watched her confidence grow like corn in the night. Bit by bit, her dependence on the laptop did too. The “learning aid” that was genuinely helping her to be a more creative and more productive learner by day was opening a totally different can of worms as soon as she left the classroom. In the months leading up to The Experiment, she was spending virtually every waking after-school hour in its company: slumped on her bed, her fingers flying as she flitted between half a dozen windows of MySpace and Instant Messenger, pausing to check the done-ness of an assortment of music or video downloads.

I’d wake at two or three in the morning, channeling
Madeline
’s Miss Clavel (“Something is not right!”) and stumble down the hallway to behold my baby still astare, often in full school uniform, her eyes as wide and glassy as DVDs. Most of the time she surrendered the device wordlessly, though whether from exhaustion or obedience it was impossible to tell. I had noted that her resignation as she handed over the goods seemed mingled with relief, like a five-year-old playing with matches—fascinated but at some level frightened. Half wanting to be caught.

When we first talked about The Experiment, Sussy warned me she wouldn’t be able to sleep at all without her laptop. I pointed out that she wasn’t able to sleep at all with it. “It’s not like I’m not trying,” she insisted. “I just . . . don’t ... sleep.” I was reminded of the time some years earlier when she declared herself unable to smile for a family photograph. “It’s not my fault,” she wailed pathetically. “I’ve forgotten how!”

Our Wi-Fi didn’t extend as far as Bill’s room—thank the Lord for low signal strength!—but Anni’s room, like Sussy’s, had a sweet spot if you angled your laptop just right (and trust me, she did, even if it meant hanging sideways off the top bunk). Anni had gone as a scholarship student to the same laptop-centric school Sussy now attended, and she’d been equally vulnerable to the siren song of 24/7 connectivity. The difference was, then there’d been so much less to connect
to.
The four years between the girls had seen the dawning of the golden age of Web 2.0.The ensuing rise of interactivity and social-networking utilities had turned the Internet from a glorified public library to a transglobal theme park. Forget about heading to the malt shop after school. With the appearance of MySpace the world was their malt shop. It never closed, and it never stopped serving.

Bill, who was in public school, had never acquired a laptop. His nighttime ritual, pre-Experiment, was all about television. He had the monster set in his room—the only child in our family who enjoyed that dubious privilege—and formed the habit of falling asleep to its comforting flicker and drone. Even if the girls were watching the same show in the family room, Bill preferred to watch his own set—occasionally making a cameo appearance during commercials. Lord knows why he was so attached to it. As described, it was old, and the reception was laughable, despite—or possibly because of—a primitive set of rabbit ears he’d rigged up out of a wire coat hanger. Most mornings when I’d go in to wake him for school, I’d find the television still on, its hectic presence dominating the tiny bedroom like graffiti that could talk back.

During the midterm interview—in the bleak midwinter of our disconnect—Bill was as uninformative as . . . well, as a fifteen-year-old boy being interviewed by his mother. I was not overly concerned. The impact of the previous three months had been so obvious in Bill’s case, I was really only going through the motions. “Do you miss TV?” I asked him almost as mechanically as he’d been answering.

“Not really,” he grunted. And then, just as I was ready to move on from this stunning adventure in self-analysis, he added a postscript: “Anyway, I sleep better.” When I pressed him for details, as a mother does, he went all evasive on me again, as a son does. He insisted the phenomenon couldn’t be described. “How can I describe it? I don’t understand the biomechanics of sleep!” he protested—a deliberate misreading of my desire to know more. “I just feel more refreshed after my sleep, okay?”

Because Bill had always been such a reliable sleeper, generally dropping off (in his own words) “like a man falling into a sewer,” it had never occurred to me to worry about the quality of his sleep. Later, when I read that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends parents remove television sets from their children’s bedrooms, I realized I’d been dreaming.

As we have already noted, a bedroom television predisposes kids to eat more junk food, read less, and—most obvious of all—watch more TV: four to five hours more a week. The 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation study found “more and more media are migrating to young people’s bedrooms,” with more than three-quarters of eleven-to eighteen-year-olds owning a personal TV and a third enjoying bedside Internet access. Twenty-nine percent of Americans eight to eighteen years old own a laptop: the ultimate in wall-to-wall media convenience and increasingly the device du jour for watching video content anyhow. The evidence is incontrovertible: The more time kids spend “screening,” the less time they spend sleeping. Less obviously, the relationship between family meals and sleep is highly correlated too: The more time children spend at family meals, the more time they spend asleep (presumably not simultaneously), according to research published in the
Journal of Family Psychology
in 2007.

When researchers Steven Eggermont and Jan Van den Bulck examined the use of media as a sleep aid among 2,500 teenagers, they found that more than a third watched TV to help them fall asleep; 60 percent reported listening to music; half read books, and more than a quarter of boys—but only half as many girls—played computer games. Across the board, teens who fell asleep to music, TV, or the computer screen “slept fewer hours and were significantly more tired” than those who read or used no sleep aid.
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The real question—apart from “How the hell can anybody fall asleep playing a computer game? ”—is
Why?