Generation of Absent Parents
The epidemic of digital drugs that no one talks about.
My daughter and I go on dates every Friday. It’s a tradition going back years. I look forward to Fridays because it’s a chance to have fun, let go of all the burdens of work and life, and get rooted again—both in my childhood and family. However, I have noticed a troubling trend that has only inflated since the pandemic started. That is, parents who are close in proximity to their kids (in the same space) yet utterly absent from them.
A sad example of this is a daddy-daughter dance that my daughter and I went to recently. While we were having fun pretending to know how to dance, at least a third of the dads were sitting in a chair scrolling through Facebook. Their daughters longed for attention, but their parents were too busy and lost in a pretend world. So many parents can’t go to the zoo, children’s museum, or even the bathroom without constant contact with their digital muse. It is an epidemic no one talks about and a drug the likes of which we have never seen.
One recent study found that parents spend an average of five hours daily on their phones. The same study found that parents spend less than four hours daily on significant activities with their kids.1 Another study from PBS found that, on average, parents of children ages 8 to 18 consume screen media for more than nine hours each day, and of that, these parents devote nearly eight hours to watching movies, playing video games, and scrolling through social media.2
In psychology (the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behavior in a given context), parental neglect is marked with many different labels. For simplicity, let’s use the term emotional neglect. Emotional neglect is when you don’t receive meaningful attention from the ones who are supposed to give it—primarily parents or caregivers.
There are lasting long-term effects to growing up in an environment that neglects emotional attention. Those effects include (but are not limited to):
Deep discomfort or awkwardness with expressing feelings from others or self, which may apply to positive or negative feelings or both.
A chronic sense of emptiness or emotional numbness that comes and goes.
A secret belief that they are somehow inexplicably flawed.
A sense of being different from other people in some unnamable way.
A tendency toward guilt and shame.
Lack of understanding of feelings and how they work.3
Maybe as you are reading that list, it strikes a nerve. We were all made for emotional connection. We were made from a God who exists in a union or relationship. The very ontological makeup of the human being is relational. When connection is interfered with or removed, it doesn’t just cause surface-level relationships; it starts to shatter the essence of who we are. And when the emotional connection is lacking from a parent or caregiver, we inevitably project that broken connection onto God (the Father).
Indeed, every generation struggles with things that don’t matter, capturing our attention and leaving the things that do matter wanting more. But what is capturing our generation is unique in that it is so widespread that it has become systematic. In most careers, we use technology frequently. Make no mistake; technology is a significant advancement. But the practical and beneficial use of technology blurs the lines of the deadly use of technology, specifically relating to social media.
To be clear, I’m not a conspiracy theorist who thinks social media is terrible and we’re all doomed because of it. However, what is happening with social media is that Millennials who didn’t get the emotional connection they needed superficially found that connection through social media platforms. That’s where the addiction comes from. It’s not that we love staring endlessly at pictures of someone’s kids that we knew 30 years ago; it’s that we long for friendship and approval from others. Therefore, we post our best pictures, think long and hard about our comments, polish them up to impress, and watch for any and every post so we don’t “miss out” on anything.
Because we are likely unaware of the psychological effects on our digital—fake—connections, we make homes in digital worlds. We retreat there when we feel exposed or let down. We entertain ourselves there when we are bored. We let those in the digital neighborhood inform our beliefs on everything. We allow the hit of social “likes” to become therapy for our imbalances.
And while we live in fantasy land, the real world is missing us—the tangible and present world, life, beauty, and authentic connections keep going. Our kids get older and, with or without us, are being formed into something. Our spouse waits for our attention, only wanting to know we see and hear them. Our parents get older, and our friends progress into new stages in life. All this authentic stuff is happening, and we spend half of our days in a world that doesn’t exist.
Then, kids grow up emotionally neglected, and where do they go to find solace? The digital pretend world, which is the example given to them by their parents. Like a drug or alcohol addiction, someone has to break the addictive line in the family. Someone has to wake up and realize, “This is not how it is supposed to be.” This is why I’m writing this piece. As a culture, specifically as parents, we must wake up and return to reality.
We need to search out therapy to address the needs that tempt us to fall back into living absent from real life. We need to have conversations of repentance for how we’ve allowed our phones to run our lives. We need to make up for lost time. The best time to start is now.
What practical ways mitigate our tendency to live on our phones?
Set specific times of the day when you can check your social media accounts and stick to it. For example, during your lunch hour at work, you allow yourself to see what’s going on online. But outside of that lunch hour, you don’t. This will be extremely difficult at first, but over time, you will retrain your brain to see this as sufficient.
Put your phone up when you get home from work somewhere you can’t easily access it. This allows you to be present without the temptation of hearing the buzzing or dinging of notifications.
Turn off notifications. Notifications are meant to draw you back to the platform—that’s how these companies make money. Turning off your notifications will put your usage back on your terms.
Take extended breaks from social media. Take a month, a couple of months, a year, or maybe a permanent break from being online. This is the most effective way to retrain your brain away from digital spaces. I’ve done this multiple times, and when I returned to the space, I did not need to check it very often.
Get help from a therapist. The most important thing you can do for your mental health is address the deep-rooted issues that cause you to tend to social disengagement. A therapist can help you sift through the noise and put things in their proper context.
Digital usage alone isn’t wrong. You’re reading this on some form of technology. Allowing digital usage to control our lives will steal life from us and the people we care about. Let’s wake up and get back into the real world.
https://www.earth.com/news/parents-spend-the-most-time-on-devices-but-nature-offers-a-solution/#
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/much-time-parents-spend-screens
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/childhood-emotional-neglect/202112/the-lingering-harm-of-childhood-emotional-neglect