Cut off point

SUSAN MAUSHART reached digital breaking point two years ago when she saw how the virtual age had become her family’s real life. She would text her three teenage children to come to the dinner table and hadn’t had eye contact with them for months. When she struck up a conversation, it was usually with the back of their heads, so engrossed were they in their gaming consoles and laptops.

“They were still having friends over, but more and more of their socialising took the form of little knots of spectators gathered around the cheery glow of YouTube or, worse, dispersed into separate corners, each to his own device,” she says.

Her own relationship with technology was not healthy, either. At 50, she had become an iPhone addict. “I gave my iPhone a name, iNez, started buying it outfits and sleeping with it.

I’d take it into the bathroom.”

Ms Maushart has now written The Winter Of Our Disconnect, which charts a six-month experiment in which she pulled the plug on all digital devices. It confirms what many parents fear about the adverse effects of electronic media on family life.

The New Yorker, who moved 24 years ago to Perth, Western Australia, recalls: “I came home one day, saw the kids suctioned to their screen and cried out in exasperation, ‘What would our lives be like without all this stuff?’ Of course, no one heard me because they all had their earplugs in at the time.”

The twice-divorced single mother was concerned at the sheer number of hours her children, Sussy, Bill and Anni, then 14, 15 and 18 respectively, were spending on electronic media.

“It wasn’t cyber predators or the content of what the kids were doing that was worrying me, it was mostly about what they weren’t doing,” she says.

Computers, TVs, gaming consoles and iPods were dutifully removed, mobile phones hidden, the internet disconnected.

“It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I found out much later that the kids didn’t believe I was going to follow through with it.

There was resistance, but they didn’t dig their heels in.”

Initially, the children spent a lot of time out of the house where they could gain access to the virtual world. If they had homework, they could use the internet at the library. But, gradually, their need to be digitally connected decreased.

Ms Maushart also had some withdrawal symptoms, she admits. “I was plagued in the early days by what seemed to be an absolute need to know stuff, to Google stuff.

“How often do you do that in the course of a day and you really think it’s important? It is so addictive and this ‘need to know’ is such a delusion.

It’s just a bad behavioural tic. It doesn’t make you smarter, or more efficient or better able to negotiate your life.”

She spent a lot of money trying to keep the children entertained in the first few weeks.

“They’d say, ‘Take us to the movies, take us to dinner. It was your idea so you have to pay for it’. That was one of the downsides which I never anticipated. I thought we were going to save all this money. I was foolish. Books and movies are much more expensive than going on the internet.

“I also thought we’d all get fit and thin, which didn’t happen either, partly because we all found it difficult to get into fitness routines without an iPod. The thought of having to listen to the gym’s piped music was pretty grim.”

Surprisingly, the three children were not alienated by their peers when their online communication was cut off.

“Never underestimate the perversity of a teenager,” Ms Maushart says. “The kids’ friends regarded the whole thing as a wonderful novelty. Our home became a magnet for kids because it was something so different.

When they came to our house, there’d always be somebody playing some sort of board game.

“They would cook, make cups of cocoa, have old-fashioned sleepovers where, instead of having a DVD marathon or watching YouTube all night, they’d sit on the bed and give each other make-overs. Pretty quickly they switched on to things that are intrinsically more fun anyway.”

The girls took up cooking while her son picked up the saxophone, which he hadn’t played for two years because he had been too busy playing World of Warcraft.

Ms Maushart says: “He’s just about to enter an academy of performing arts in Australia for jazz performers, so it has literally changed his life.”

ALL her children changed during the process, but most noticeably her youngest, Sussy, who was suffering from sleep deprivation because of her social networking on MySpace and Facebook far into the night. When the digital detox kicked in, she caught up on her sleep. “She became a different kid. She was so much more reasonable, less moody.”

Ms Maushart had always known that they would all go back online when the experiment was over, but re-connecting brought mixed feelings, she says.

“It was in the middle of winter when we switched back on. Those final weeks were pretty tough going. I was really looking forward to being able to watch TV with my family again.”

Re-connected, the family went on a media bender. Ms Maushart recalls: “We had a digital binge. We had all our devices set out on the table – the laptops, the phones. It was like Christmas switching everything on at once. We were up until 4am.”

Today, they may be re-connected, but they don’t use those digital props as much as they used to. She recalls her son’s two consecutive birthdays, one before the experiment and one during it.

On the first one, they went out for a meal and the children couldn’t wait to return to the car and their mobile phones. But his next birthday was different. “I bought him books and the four of us spent two hours having a beautiful time just laughing and talking. We know how to talk to each other again.”

* The Winter Of Our Disconnect, by Susan Maushart (Profile, £11.99)