Can We Unplug Our Kids? - Part II: Mea Culpa

Introduction

I just read a very distressing New Yorker article, “Has Social Media Fuelled a Teen-Suicide Crisis?” which made me remember an essay I posted here a few months back. In “Can We Unplug Our Kids?” I referenced a new book about the epidemic of mental illness among teens, which cited social media as a main cause, and then I made the case that ahead of any societal interventions to protect teens on social media, parents can help fight the tide by setting appropriate boundaries. I cited my own family’s experience to support this position. Looking back, I realize that my post—by focusing only on my own history—neglected to consider how thorny the issue really is across the spectrum of American families. Now I have a sheepish feeling that my essay, if not outright smug, was naïve and incomplete, with air about it of “let them eat cake.” So I’m revisiting the topic here, to do it better justice.

A bit of background

Having just trashed my first post a bit, I won’t expect you to go (re-)read it now. To summarize, I explained how I guessed that some parents are somewhat complicit in teens’ dependence on smartphones, since the parents can use them as digital leash (i.e., keep tabs on their kids). In return the kids get basically unfettered access to everything these phones bring, including a steady stream of social one-upmanship and algorithm-driven news and gossip. Meanwhile, I asserted, parents themselves often set a poor example with these devices, erring on the side of embracing the always-online culture for fear of missing out. Then I explained the draconian online policies my wife and I enforced to good effect, such as no social media, no gaming, no phone until high school, no smartphone until college, and limits on video streaming and time online. My post explained how this kept my kids from getting sucked too far into the online world, and had the added (and unexpected) benefit of possibly making them more autonomous and resilient as young adults.

Looking back, and especially in light of the recent New Yorker article, I realize my focus was too much on parents and what they can control, without enough examination of the size and complexity of the challenge they’re up against. Sure, my family was up to the challenge, but I didn’t fully grasp how much my own privilege and luck played into that. I hope to shed more light on the larger problem, so that parents who happen to read this can a) cut themselves some slack, and b) understand how important it is that society better regulate this profit-driven online world to take some of the burden off of parents.

Privilege

It’s embarrassing mistaking one’s own privilege for a just, merit-based society. Decades ago I applied for a job and the branch director, who had the final say in hiring me, was the last to interview me. He stood about six-foot-five, and the first thing he said to me was, “You’re tall … I like that!” Obviously he was joking, and I took the joke as a harmless ice-breaker, but over time I’ve come to appreciate that affinity bias is a big deal, and the fact that this director and I could laugh about it really underscored how unfair it was. If I’d been short and he’d joked, “You’re short, but I’ll try to look past that,” I wouldn’t have found it funny at all. I’m reminded of a great New Yorker cartoon (click here and advance to cartoon 10) where a small fish is thinking, “There is no justice in the world,” and a larger fish about to eat him is thinking, “There is some justice in the world,” and an even larger fish, about to eat him, is thinking, “The world is just.”

The ability my wife and I had to set limits on our kids’ online life had everything to do with privilege. If these girls were raised by, say, a single mother working two jobs to make ends meet, they wouldn’t have benefited from nearly as much oversight. My wife was able to stay home with the kids, and thus have all kinds of time and energy to build rapport with them, and read to them, and never needed to use a TV or computer as a babysitter.

Meanwhile, I worked from home part of the time, so I could help set the right example, and have more time with the kids, and (since our one shared family laptop lived down in the home office) could even supervise them somewhat. I had the luxury of requiring them to log, on paper, their online time, and could police this. Moreover, through my job I had a solid understanding of how tech companies market online services, and how concepts like page views, dwell time, and share/forward metrics are used in designing and “improving” their products. I also had enterprise-grade firewall and WiFi equipment, and the know-how to use it, which made it possible to shape and limit my kids’ Internet access.

Obviously not every family enjoys this kind of privilege. This really hit home for me when I read, in the recent New Yorker article, about a couple who lost a daughter to suicide after her torturous experience online, culminating in Instagram’s algorithm sending her suicide-related content. Her mother lamented:

“In the Black community, low-income, where I teach, parents are not educated enough on any type of technology … We [parents] thought we were two well-educated people. I want to educate the parents first and then the students: What’s an algorithm? What do these sites do?”

Here’s an analogy. Suppose the sidewalk between your home and your kids’ school were littered with broken glass, razor blades, and used syringe needles. If you have the time to walk your kids to school, you’d see this for yourself and would take immediate action. If you don’t walk your kid to school, but you’re a connected and concerned parent, perhaps you’d hear about this problem from other parents. Meanwhile, even a totally overworked parent who doesn’t have time to talk to other parents would benefit from the overall community’s awareness of the problem. But social media, unlike my simplistic sidewalk scenario, features threats that are invisible. Addictiveness is built into these products by design, for profit; the algorithms driving teens’ behavior are opaque to anyone outside the industry; and these algorithms care only about increasing dwell time and shares, even if this means sending suicide-themed videos to depressed kids, instead of the phone number for a suicide hotline. How could a typical parent grasp this threat? It is a sad state of affairs that only a parent who has a background in tech, and who has time to read news articles like the one in The New Yorker, knows he needs to inculcate his kid practically from birth on the downside of the online world.

Luck

In my previous post on this topic I also failed to appreciate the role that blind luck played in my family’s navigation of the Internet and social media. For one thing, we got an early start, simply because my brother has kids a fair bit older than mine and I got to learn from their experience. One incident comes immediately to mind. Decades ago, because I wanted personal email with no ads, I bought a service with at least a dozen mailboxes on my own private domain. I used this for my own address, my wife’s, my mom’s, and my mother-in-law’s, and offered it to my brothers and their kids. One of them eventually came to me asking to be set up because, to her great anguish, Google had abruptly shut off her Gmail, deleting her address book and all her stored emails, because they decided nobody under the age of thirteen should have it. (This was probably because of their AdSense context-based ads.) The wrinkle was that Google never know any user’s age until and unless that user tried to sign up for Google+, their fledgling (and ultimately unsuccessful) social media platform that featured an age limit, hence the suddenness of the Gmail lock-out. This abrupt change caused quite a stir on the Internet, and I read—with fascination—the comments that parents put below one of the articles. One outraged parent, lamenting the disruption this caused his daughter, ranted, “My daughter practically lives online!” I couldn’t detect any irony in this statement, so I guess he saw no problem with her behavior, and I found this more than a little spooky.

I was also surprised, although I perhaps shouldn’t have been, that my young niece would blithely sign up for a social media account without thinking to ask her parents, and that if Google+ had accepted her, her parents might not have even known she had the account. This episode got me thinking generally about the ramifications of kids being online, before my own kids were even old enough to participate, which was a really helpful head start. Had I happened to be the firstborn instead of the last, I’d have been blindsided like so many parents.

I also got lucky, as a parent, based on my own approach to popularity and the regard of my peers. My parents were oddballs, and we grew up largely without TV, and my father in particular had an air of superiority which unfortunately rubbed off on me, the upshot being that in elementary school I was nerdy and mostly shy but also a bit arrogant. For example, I was outspoken about hating football, and pooh-poohed other kids for wearing sweatbands on their wrists like their favorite players and for collecting little toy NFL helmets. My shy-plus-slightly-arrogant personality came across as total arrogance, which (in combination with my nerdiness) irritated people and made me an obvious target for bullying. Being a pariah, and then rising above it when I was older, taught me a lot. More than other kids, I think, I realized how tenuous and ultimately pointless popularity was and is, the result being that instead of suffering from FOMO (fear of missing out) like a lot of adults, I have FONMO (fear of not missing out) or perhaps, as one of my nieces puts it, FOFI (fear of fitting in). Thus, I was able to easily model opt-out behaviors for my daughters; my strict policies would have chafed a lot more if I hadn’t walked the walk.

But wait, there’s more. It likely wasn’t just circumstance that biased me against putting very little stock in the feedback loop of social media. I’ve been reading lately about inborn differences in personality around how people respond to social rewards. As detailed here, reward dependence (RD) has been correlated with very specific neurotransmitter system, and “individuals with high RD personalities have a disposition to recognize salient social cues which in turn facilitates effective communication, warm social relations, and their genuine care for others, but these individuals are then disadvantaged in being excessively socially dependent.” My wife self-identifies as being very low-RD, and experience bears that out; she dislikes being the center of attention to the extent that I had to practically beg her even to have a wedding. I’m not much different (for example, I’m perfectly content to labor over this blog even though I receive very little indication that people are even reading, much less enjoying, my posts). So by random chance, we both appear to be predisposed by our brain chemistry to avoid online likes and smileys, which has given us a concerted parenting approach that includes, for example, disallowing social media on our WiFi. Many high-RD parents might naturally assume that the positive feedback their kids get online could be an unalloyed good thing.

On top of all this, reward dependence is thought to be innate and moderately heritable, and indeed my kids strike me as fairly low in RD, just like my wife and me. Thus, the success we’ve had with our restrictive policies may have as much to do with genetic traits as it does with our ability to explain and justify our position on phones and social media. Other parents, with higher-RD kids, might not have it so easy.

My final examination of luck involves the love my wife and I have for reading. We both have had a lifelong appreciation of books that so far nothing—not Netflix, YouTube, podcasts, or social media—has been able to compete with. This made parenting easier because we could enjoy, right alongside our kids, the books that had to stand in for other forms of entertainment. I can honestly and sincerely tell you that I enjoyed all the books I read to my kids, even the earliest ones made of fabric so the hapless kid couldn’t accidently whack himself with it and dent his forehead. It is without exaggeration that I can say I actually looked forward to reading Clifford’s Bathtime —a board book so basic and simple I had it memorized after only like the twentieth reading—every time one of my daughters asked for it. I combed the online used bookstores to buy up the books I’d enjoyed as a boy, like Cowboy Sam, the Moomintroll books, and the William Pène du Bois Otto books, so I could relive them with my kids. While other dads were watching sports on TV or manning the grill, I was sitting in the La-Z-Boy with one or both kids reading Bridget and the Gray Wolves or Hepcat. I realize this behavior is not normal, and in fact (though I probably shouldn’t admit this), half the reason I even wanted kids was to get to read to them from whatever book struck their fancy. I look forward to having grandkids for this very reason, and in the meantime here’s a recent photo of me reading to my great-niece.

In contrast, I once saw a dad reading to his kid in a doctor’s office waiting room, and he was skipping words and even entire sentences, apparently figuring his kid couldn’t tell the difference so why not get through the book faster? I was scandalized and my impulse was to drag the guy outside and beat him. And yet I realize not all parents are that into books, especially kids’ books, and thus they may have a harder time keeping their kids entertained without resorting to laptops, tablets, or a phone. What a random gift, this love of reading. I highly suspect that the sting of a non-digital life was made easier to bear for my children when they could curl up in my lap for a dose of not just dopamine but serotonin, or (later in their childhood) a good discussion of dramatic irony, or a debate about which translation of Nikolai Gogol is superior.

In conclusion

I hope you, too, love reading, since I admittedly rambled a bit just now. Suffice to say, if you are a parent struggling to compete with the endless barrage of images, videos, and messages flooding your kid(s) through their devices, and with this nonstop virtual party they’re attending that you weren’t invited to, just do your best. And, as a voter and a concerned citizen, please also do what you can to help reign in these tech companies who clearly are putting profit above any sense of social responsibility. I realize now that not all parents are in the same position I have been to impose strict limits on their kids’ activities online, and I apologize if my earlier post implied that it all comes down to responsible parenting. The problem is much, much larger than that.

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Epic France Trans Alps Cycling Trip - Part I

Introduction

I did a week-long fully-supported bike trip through the French Alps with three friends. We hopscotched from one fancy hotel to another, with a full staff in vans supporting us the whole way. The trip was called the Epic France Trans Alps, and basically took us over every major Alpine mountain pass featured in the Tour de France. Not just this year’s Tour, but all of them. That’s 18 categorized climbs, half of them “Hors Categorie,” aka HC, which means “so difficult they cannot be classified.”

If you think this sounds hard, you’re right, though I’m suffering worse now that I’m on an airplane, in coach, headed back to my worldly responsibilities, and the person in the seat next to me has really bad breath. I’m about to start looking for a parachute…

This ride report will dispense with my usual formula of recounting the food and then the riding. There’s just too much to report, and I doubt you overmuch care what order we did anything in. This is just a highlights reel, and every couple thousand words I’ll cut it off and call it a post. (Readers complain I go on too long….)

Rental bike

The airlines are apparently cooler these days about not charging for bicycles, but they don’t take liability for any damage. Plus, I’m lazy, so I rented a bike. On the first day, we supplied the staff mechanic with pedals, saddles, bike computers, etc. and made sure the fit was right. We’d sent in our measurements in advance, and sure enough, the bike fit me pretty darn well. The tires looked really fat, and seemed awfully soft, but I’m told that’s the modern style. I asked three different randos if the tires felt too squishy to them, and they all said naw, it’s fine.

In case you’re a tech weenie, here’s the bike. I’m not going to geek out on the details other than to say it has a carbon frame, hella aero wheels, disc brakes, 12 cogs in the back, a compact double up front, and SRAM electronic shifting. The shifting hasn’t changed much since I first reported on it, here. Over the course of the week, I threw my chain three times, but in each case I was able to shift it back on via lever-taps, without needing to stop. (I did have to restart my heart each time.)

Wine with lunch?!

Since the first ride would just be an hour or so (to shake down the bikes), we had lunch in the hotel restaurant instead of having a picnic on the road. I’ve never done one of these supported tours before, so I kind of go with the flow and just play along like I know the drill. (I know—story of my life, right?) So when the waitress opened a bottle of wine for the table, and my pals elected to partake (“We wouldn’t want to waste it,” Ian said), I went along. I know drinking before hard exercise is absurd (even a small amount that wouldn’t affect motor skills), but I figured what the hell, I’m eating all this great bread anyway, it’ll sop it up. I was a couple sips in when we noticed waitresses rushing around removing wine bottles from the tables. “A mistake was made,” one explained to us, though she stopped short of removing our bottle since we’d started in on it. I guess the wine was only for the staff, not the riders. Oops.

When dessert arrived—crème brûlée—the others turned it down, not wanting to still be digesting as we tackled the Montée d’Avoriaz. I said screw it—I paid for this dessert, and it’s gonna be tasty. I’d muddle through the ride somehow, I figured.

Col des Égos

I knew this first ride would bring out the egos. There were two week-long tours running simultaneously, with the same staff and hotels, but different routes. The Epic one I signed up for has longer days and more climbs than the Trans group would do. Then, within each tour there was an A group and a B group. (My old scoutmaster would have called them “the kickass group and the pick-ass group,” bless his twisted, deeply suspect heart.) I was surprised that fully 15 of the Epic riders declared themselves Group A. Some of these guys looked a little old to me. Sure, they were fit and trim, but come on … it won’t be long before they’ll be offered wheelchairs at airports. I’d assumed going into this tour that I’d be bringing up the rear, hopefully not making everyone wait too long, but now I wasn’t so sure. One thing I did know: everyone was going to go super hard on this opening ride, to strut their stuff. It’s just how the male ego works. Except mine: I vowed (silently) to behave.

In the event, there was little temptation for me to hammer. My (albeit world class) stomach was working pretty hard on all that bread and crème brûlée, and surely the wine didn’t help. Meanwhile, I’d discovered that riding out of the saddle was tricky because my tires were, I now realized, severely underinflated. As I rocked the bike, there was a slight handling latency, the front tire buckling just a bit. It was like trying to sleep on a downy airbed, one of those weirdly thick ones, that when they invariably lose air start to sway a bit, like you’re onboard ship. In fact, my bike and I both felt a bit woozy in general. It was like some foggy, slow-motion dream, rider after rider rolling by me. This one guy passed me in a switchback and said, in a Mr. Rogers voice, “Coming through!” There was something so politely triumphant about it, it kind of rankled, especially since he was so damn old. He looked like he could be 40-something from the neck down, though looking at his face you’d think late sixties at least. But I wasn’t about to mount any resistance to his bold move. I just watched him pedal away and thought: enjoy yourself. Enjoy stomping me. Enjoy your $9K bike. I’ll be back here practicing my resignation skills, being the shit one once again.

As slow as I was going, continental drift was in my favor and I eventually made the summit. Here we are doing a photo op: the East Bay Velo Club 4, plus a couple of new pals, both (conveniently) named Michael. (I thought of not using any names here, but everyone is on Strava and if some serial killer wants to stalk wealthy cyclists he could easily do it without this blog.)

See the Michael on the right, in the neon? We chatted with him at lunch. He’s recently retired, does a fair number of these tours, and rides an old bike with a steel frame that can be disassembled like a sniper’s rifle. He was nipping at my heels all the way up the climb. I figured him for about 60 but came to learn he’s 71 years old, and still tough as nails.

I figured if I tried to descend back to the hotel with such squishy tires I’d probably roll one, so I found the van and asked the mechanic to take a look. Each tire had just 40 PSI! Boy did I feel like an idiot. Once I got those bad boys topped up at 80, my rented Felt felt like an actual road bike, no longer like a beach cruiser. The descent was glorious. Smooth, flow-y road, amazing scenery, an expert guide with perfect lines to follow. Comparing notes, Craig and I were just giddy.

Dinner

The format of this tour makes a lot of sense, for the ride and my report: if you’re sick of cycling, either because you’re knackered from a hard day in the saddle or from reading too much tedious text on the topic, suddenly there’s this great meal in front of you. We started with this:

France has clearly not (okay, has only recently) gotten the memo about cured meats being carcinogenic. (Then again, they’ve never taken the tobacco threat seriously either.) We ate cured meats roughly three times a day throughout the week, even K who is otherwise a vegetarian. It’s just so good, you never say no to all manner of charcuterie, ham, bacon, you name it. Perhaps it’s a regional specialty. That’s what I decided, anyway; I can’t be bothered to look it up now.

Here is the entrée, some kind of amazing roast pork. I must confess I’ll probably never feel perfectly natural sitting at a table and having something like this set in front of me. That’s just not how I was raised. Don’t get me wrong, my mom is an amazing cook, but our pantry always had different stuff. When was a kid, Mom would use oatmeal to stretch a pound of ground turkey to make burgers for six. Once my patty squirted out of the back of the bun and I didn’t even notice. The only beef we ever got was liver because serving it was considered a mother’s duty back in those days. We got pretty cool cheeses from some co-op, but they were all the melting, cooking kind—not like these soft French ones. Hell, we grew up drinking powdered milk. So when I had this incredible roast pork dish on my plate there was a small part of me that feared someone would suddenly rush out from the kitchen and say, “Stop! A mistake has been made! You must give that back!”

Here’s the dessert, a little cake doodad, possibly flourless, with flawless ice cream. Since we’re on the topic, here is my recipe for flourless chocolate cake.

Breakfast

Wait, you’re thinking: this report has so far delivered only 16 miles of actual cycling action, but at least 6,000 calories of food lore, and now you’re gonna talk about breakfast? Seriously?

Well, yeah. This is kind of what travel is for. As different as the Alps are from the Sierra Nevadas and the Rockies (and don’t worry, I will eventually get into these differences), the French terrain is far more similar to the American than their food is to ours. I can only imagine that a European traveler to the U.S. would be endlessly appalled by the garbage we serve up. A grocery store baguette? Forget it, it’d go straight into the garbage. And a croissant? Spongy, insipid, indestructible, ageless. Eat an American motel breakfast pastry and you’ll end up with a gross film on the roof of your mouth. And don’t you dare eat scrambled eggs from a steam tray … they’ll be soggy or dried-out or somehow both, and won’t taste a thing like an egg, which they’re not—they’re surely poured from a carton. That’s the US hospitality industry for you. Meanwhile, I stayed at an airport Holiday Inn Express in Geneva and had an entirely serviceable continental breakfast. Sure, the croissant wasn’t brilliant, but on the balance was quite worth eating. So I’m going to spend some time on the food in these posts.

This is the croissant I had at my first official tour hotel breakfast. Light, airy, buttery, and flaky enough to make a mess on my plate.

Bread in general can be intolerable in the U.S. Anything you’d get with a so-called continental breakfast in most places would just make you want to cry. Sure, we have great one-off bakeries in the Bay Area, but the quality control if you randomly toured the country would be abysmal. In contrast, you really can’t go wrong in Europe, in my experience. I fearlessly had a pre-made sandwich at the Geneva airport and another at the Zurich airport, both on rather good bread. And it wasn’t just the bread: one of these sandwiches was a Caprese. Can you imagine ordering a Caprese sandwich at an airport in America? The tomatoes would be pink and mushy, the bread like cardboard, the basil flavorless, the fresh Mozzarella soggy and limp. You’d probably start crying. I certainly would.

On the flip side, my pals and I observed something really bizarre at every French hotel we ate at: as good as the bread was, there was never any butter. WTF? Doesn’t everybody love good butter for their great bread? (Exception: I did find one little block of Président brand butter at one breakfast, which I’d thought was cheese. Maybe the hotel did, too.) Even olive oil was never offered, and if the bread hadn’t been so good we’d surely have complained (I mean, other than to each other). At our last dinner there was one little oil/vinegar dispenser going around, but literally just one, and the absolutely world class waitstaff seemed really flummoxed: perhaps not by not having more of these dispensers, but by this one having shown up out of nowhere seeding discontent at neighboring tables.

Meanwhile, I cannot understand the French hotel industry’s inability to cater to Americans’ coffee tastes. Every coffee shop in America has some version of a basic house coffee. Isn’t Starbucks showcasing this globally now? Plus, the archetypal large mug of coffee is featured in countless Hollywood movies that are exported around the world. The concept is not complicated: we drink a dark brown beverage, brewed from coffee beans, in quantities of 12 to 24 ounces, and we call it, simply, “coffee.” It is not cappuccino or espresso or any other kid-size micro-beverage that you drink like it’s a shot of booze. I thought we had this coffee mismatch solved after World War II when Europeans saw our American soldiers watering down their dinky coffee-bean-freebasing drinks and took to calling this larger beverage an Americano, but nobody in the Rhône-Alpes region seems to have heard of this. The machines have all these buttons with weird names like “Café Long” which doesn’t mean anything in any language, or “Café Noisette” which sounds like it would be “noisy” but actually literally translates “hazelnut” which the ensuing beverage did not have the slightest flavor of. Over the course of the trip I tried six or eight different fancy digital coffee machines and a few humans and never did get a normal cup of coffee, not even an Americano. Most of what I drank tasted mainly like foamed milk and at no point did I manage to get the simple black coffee I was looking for. It’s like some vast conspiracy to deliberately fail to understand this simple concept of what non-fussy, non-micro, basic-ground-coffee-bean-based beverages are supposed to be. I never even saw a normal mug, except this one in my hotel room (the purpose of which was not clear, but which I liked due to the cyclist pattern):

To be continued…

Well, I see I’ve pretty much run out of room here, or more to the point you’ve run out of patience. Tune in next time when I promise to get as far as the Col de Joux Plane, the Col de la Columbière, the Col de Croix Fry, and surely another meal or two.

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