​Love = Phone-Free Attention?

Did you catch the recent New York Times article called Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.? It’s about two things most of us love passionately—students and our smart phones.

More specifically, it’s about the way some students are starting to express their feelings about phones, conversation, and personal relationships. Author Sherry Turkle has been “studying the psychology of online connectivity for more than 30 years.” Her conclusions about the impact on our kids of near-constant phone use—theirs and ours—is fascinating.

One 15-year-old I interviewed at a summer camp talked about her reaction when she went out to dinner with her father and he took out his phone to add “facts” to their conversation. “Daddy,” she said, “stop Googling. I want to talk to you.” A 15-year-old boy told me that someday he wanted to raise a family, not the way his parents are raising him (with phones out during meals and in the park and during his school sports events) but the way his parents think they are raising him — with no phones at meals and plentiful family conversation. One college junior tried to capture what is wrong about life in his generation. “Our texts are fine,” he said. “It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together that’s the problem.”

The piece covers much more ground and it’s worth the read, but those quotes from students landed with me. They reveal an opportunity for youth leaders, as well as for parents: One way we can demonstrate that we care about our students is to simply refuse to touch our phones when we’re hanging out with them. All of us already know this, of course, and some of us are even successfully doing it. But hearing students themselves equate phone-free eye contact with meaningful connection makes it feel more personal.

Here’s the deal, though: This won’t likely be a two-way street. Students will continue to divide themselves between us, their phones, and shiny objects nearby. We’re talking about unilateral surrender of our attention in hopes of better communicating the love of Christ.

For many of us, not touching our phones for an hour or more can feel like choosing not to use our right arm. But if that’s what it takes to convince a few students that they’re valuable to us, we can live without a right arm for a bit.