There seems to be an app or device for nearly every aspect of parenting today, from monitoring your baby and entertaining your toddler to connecting with other parents for tips, tricks, and socializing. It’s easy for parents to become overwhelmed with all the choices of which gadgets to use and when, but what if you didn’t have to? Well, for all the parents of preschoolers or younger, here’s the simple truth: with very few exceptions, technology for kids under the age of five is basically worthless.
The same goes for parent-targeted tech shilled out by Silicon Valley, from apps that track your child’s weight to Mommas’ groups on social media that purport to trump real world friendships. If you want to raise a resilient, smart, successful human and minimize your parenting anxiety, shove your phone in the freezer and forget about it. You don’t need to take any more photos of your kids—which is distracting and takes you out of the moment—or buy any more gadgets that promise to make your kids even more perfect than they already are.
This is the parenting philosophy of journalist and writer Sophie Brickman, mother of two with a third on the way, and the author of the new book, BABY, UNPLUGGED: One Mother’s Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age (HarperOne; September 7, 2021). After talking with experts, academics, doctors, and innovators, Brickman wrote this eye-opening parenting book in which she explores the impact of our tech-saturated world on children and their parents. She argues that putting young children in front of a screen is not only less enriching or educational than letting that same child play pretend, draw, read a book, or even be bored, according to experts, it’s just not great parenting. There are reasons we all do it, and it’s virtually impossible to scrub one’s life of tech altogether—but better, she thinks, that we know the ramifications before we press the “On” switch.
In BABY, UNPLUGGED, Brickman combines her very personal and often humorous story with in-depth research she garnered, sharing her journey of becoming a parent alongside her tech-loving husband. She encourages parents and caregivers to become more informed so they can make decisions that better reflect their children’s needs as well as their family’s value system. Introducing technology into a child’s life only when you must—and with very clear, informed parameters—is just the first step.
Sophie Brickman is a writer, reporter, and editor who has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Elle, Saveur, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other outlets. Her work has also appeared in the Best Food Writing and the Best American Science Writing anthologies. A Harvard graduate, she lives in New York City with her husband and children.
Have kids? There’s an app for that…but is that a good thing?
The mother of two young daughters, journalist Sophie Brickman asked experts, academics, doctors, and innovators for advice and insight about the effects of technology on child-rearing and parenting. In BABY, UNPLUGGED: One Mother’s Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age (HarperOne; September 7, 2021) she offers an engaging, meticulously researched, and illuminating examination of the subject. With plenty of laughs interspersed throughout a charming personal narrative, she provides essential advice to parents on navigating the digital landscape and forging their own path through the morass of technological options.
BABY, UNPLUGGED answers the pressing questions parents are grappling with today, including:
BABY, UNPLUGGED brings together Brickman’s in-depth research and her own candid and often hilarious personal experience to help parents sort through the wide and confusing tech offerings available today.
Filled with relatable and entertaining stories as well as practical takeaways, BABY, UNPLUGGED is an important and timely exploration of modern parenting that will help parents restore faith in themselves as they go about the gargantuan task of raising good, social, and engaged citizens of the modern world. The book will be published September 7, 2021.