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.