“The old saw reminds us that, to a man with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. Does it follow that to a girl with a Photobucket account, the whole world looks like a fashion shoot? Or that to a boy with a joystick and a graphics card, the whole world looks like a psychotic dwarf with an axe? To an important extent—definitely more than we have been comfortable admitting—yes, it sort of does. Ultimately, the answer is not to take away the hammer, but to see that it is used for more than bashing away at things. To ensure our children free their hands—and their heads—to take up other tools too.” --Excerpt from The Winter of Our Disconnect
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When Long Island native Susan Maushart was living in Australia with her three children, she pulled the plug on the family's electronics. For six months in 2009, she and her son and daughters, then ages 14, 15 and 18, gave up devices from iPods to cell phones to video games in their home. Maushart wrote about the results of what the family came to call "The Experiment" in the new book "The Winter of Our Disconnect: How Three Totally Wired Teenagers (and a Mother Who Slept With Her iPhone) Pulled the Plug on Their Technology and Lived to Tell the Tale" (Tarcher/Penguin paperback, $16.95).
"Technology isn't evil," Maushart says - in fact, now that she has moved to Mattituck with her youngest daughter, Sussy, 16, she relishes using Skype and Facebook to keep in close touch with her two older kids still in Australia.