The Day the Mailbox Ate my Phone, a Speech on Low Media Life
Mar 06, 2025 | by Shoshana Kirk (NVS Parent)
I am here to offer you a bigger question, bigger than the nitty gritty of living with kids and screens. We could –and should – talk about whether your kid might get a phone in 8th grade vs 9th grade, whether you should have a contract for it, whether your 4th grader should watch a family movie and which one and how do you find good information about content. Or, what to do on an airplane with your 8 year old when the person in front of you is watching a violent movie. Or, whether you let your kid do group chat, snapchat, or no chat. I could tell you all sorts of encouraging things, too, as a low-media parent for over 15 years, the parent of a high schooler who eschews social media and is not actually addicted to her phone, or I could worry with you about my 9 year old who, like a crow, eyes every shiny device under the sun. We should talk about all of these things, because these things are complicated and hard and require creativity and intention and support for one another.
This choice to be low media, low device is not just a school choice but a lifestyle choice. It is not something school can do for you. It is a harder path than just letting the floodgates open as do many of our peers with kids in more mainstream schools. There are certainly many benefits to it, but there are challenges too, and it helps to be honest about those.
For one thing, it takes more work. I know this firsthand and I want everyone to know that. It wasn’t until my second child was born that I realized several things: my older child had an exceptionally long attention span and slothlike energy level and a talent at turning boredom into an imaginative opportunity. My second child quickly demonstrated the attention span of a goldfish and the energy of a cheetah. He also able to turn boredom into an imaginative opportunity. It’s just that “imaginative” involved moving furniture to get into the cabinets, or poking at his sister while quietly entertaining herself—until she screamed. Prior to this, I believed boredom was gift, but I started to believe it actually lead to mischief. Of course, I didn’t have much time to wonder about this because I was too busy being that person, the who was no longer invited to certain friends and family members’ quiet living rooms. We could have simply given Ash an iPad and been done with it. So I get it, I’ve been there, I am there, and it’s tough.
A few weeks ago, as a matter of fact, we were setting out for a day in the city together when Ash was determined to chose the audio story on my phone. I had just pulled onto Highway 1, with my daughter Chloe in the passenger seat and Ash in the back, when Ash suddenly lunged over me across the steering wheel to grab my telephone. As luck would have it, I was also approaching the row of mailboxes on the side of Highway 1. I thundered to Ash to buckle his seatbelt , swerved to our locked mailbox, ripped the phone out of its holder, and – before I had a chance to reconsider—shoved my phone inside.
Two things happened. The first was that I thought, “I really hope that is still there at the end of the day!” And the second thing was that when I got back into the car, it was completely silent. At last Chloe whispered, “Mama, will you be able to get around today without your phone?”
It was then that I realized: My children have not known me before I had a device with me all the time. My children haven’t know life before all the adults and a lot of the kids had devices around all the time. Even on backpacking trips in the wilderness, an adult has always brought a phone for taking photos.
The only times in recent years when I have been truly phone free have been on retreat, out of sight, while my kids were at home with my husband—and his phone.
I realized then -- we had a much bigger problem than who got to choose the audio story.
The pull of the device and its intrusion into our lives is real. A phone is a tool, useful for many things. It also clamors for our attention. In a given evening I might use my phone in front of my kids to play music at home, check on the shipping status of someone’s delayed leotard, read an email from New Village, message someone about carpool, pull up a recipe for dinner, check the weather for CWOW tomorrow, program the washing machine, on and on it goes. The telephone is no longer, as it was when we were kids, sitting in its cradle waiting to ring. The telephone is The Thing That Adults Pay Attention To All The Time. From the point of view of children, I imagine, it is the phone that is in charge of life, not the adult.
Folks wiser than I have looked at the very intentional, persuasive design of apps and phones, folks teach classes on mindfulness of technology, and make films like The Social Dilemma. They don’t – and I don’t – have a complete solution to the problem. What I can offer is simply this: when we let ourselves get pulled, over and over and over to the screen, we are denying ourselves the full experience of being human, the full experience of being present in our lives with its 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. And that every time we resist, for however small a moment, to witness the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches of being in the world, we give ourselves the gift of our own lives.
For this is the real question before us. Not simply “How do we show up and be present for our children?” But “How do we show up and be present in our own lives?”
My dad spent his last weeks in a recliner with a view of his back deck. By this time in his cancer, he was no longer reading books or poetry or the news, music and television were turned off, and he simply lie in silence. I remember walking in and sitting down next to him one afternoon, taking his hand, the sun was coming warmly through the sliding glass doors, and he said: “The patterns of light coming in through the railing on the deck – aren’t they amazing? The most interesting patterns, and they are always changing.” Absorbed in my own distress at seeing my dad’s world shrink before me, I missed the deeper message. What his statement reveals is the gift of many moments of boredom: my dad had developed a mind that could, even in such a circumstance find an opportunity to witness the beauty and the mystery around us.
A mind like this is not shaped by watching youtube, cruising your “feed,” checking your email, or peeking at headlines for a hit of adrenaline. It’s not that my dad didn’t use devices—he did. But he had also lived many years of his life without them: at sea reading books, gardening, backpacking, fishing, playing cards, cooking, telling stories—all the things we adults used to do to entertain ourselves, before our first go-to was the phone. We waited in line at the post office and stared at people. We sat on subways and secretly stared at people. We sat on subways and caught other people staring at us. We whiled away hours and hours sitting in cafes, not with our eyes on our devices, but with our eyes on the world around us, drinking coffee and smoking and making up stories about the passersby. We were great observers of life around us.
When I am able to catch myself – you know, those times when pressingly before getting out of the car I “just check” my email, which then turns into ten minutes, putting my phone in a pocket only to get it out a moment later to pay the parking meter ,then checking the weather to see if I need a raincoat instead of looking at the sky . . . at those times, I wonder:
Who of us is watching and listening to the world around us anymore right now?
Watching and listening and imagining – those things essential to storytelling . . which is of course, the art of understanding our human lives.
Who among us, distracted as we all with our little screens, who will become our storytellers?
There is a wonderful story in a kids book called Hooray for Anna Hibiscus (by Atinuke) about a girl growing up in Nigeria with her extended family. During the city’s frequent power outages, everyone stops their work and Anna’s grandparents tell stories by candlelight. When the family acquires a generator life is no longer affected--Everyone continues with their independent pursuits. “[The generator] , she writes, “had come and swallowed grandmother’ stories and the songs of the frogs in the lagoon. It had come and blown out the candlelight and the flashlight and the jokes of the aunties and the uncles. It had come and stolen the games little cousins played in the dark . . . Anna Hibiscus did not like the generator at all, at all.”
When the generator breaks, Anna discovers her family has forgotten how to enjoy an evening without it:
“The next time the electricity went off, and the uncles came to switch on the generator, it would not start. There was no joking, or laughing, or dancing that night. The aunties sat sighing at their silent sewing machines. Big cousins stared at each other over their homework. Only the little cousins were happy. Only grandmother and grandfather were content.”
Finally Anna’s grandfather decrees: when the power goes out, sometimes they will have a modern evening with the generator and sometimes they will have a traditional evening of candles and song and dark. And in this way, they rediscover the joy of quieter time.
Like Anna Hibiscus’ family, we have to rediscover the magic of quieter, device-free time. If you’re like me, you don’t live in a jubilant extended family. I try regularly to ask myself to present, but more regularly, I forget. Apart from that recent day in the city with Ash with my phone locked in a mailbox, it seems to take a will of steel to ignore my device.
Yet, that day with Ash, he got to see me live as an adult in charge of my own life, not as a slave to a screen: I paid for a parking meter using my wallet, I talked to a real person to explain why I didn’t have electronic tickets for the concert, Ash and I sat in silence before the music began and people-watched, we ate some crappy sandwiches for lunch because all the good bagels were sold out and I didn’t have yelp along to find anything better. In short, we spent a day just being together, just being present with all the surprises and aggravations that life brings.
While that day happened by accident, we can make a choice. Whenever we are able to resist the pull of the device, we let ourselves feel the more subtle tug of our lives passing.
When I lived near Seattle, I nearly always spent ferry crossings “catching up” on things, yet I still remember the one time my phone died. I had nothing to do but look out the porthole – and on this particular dark winter afternoon, the sun was filtering down like god’s rays into the fir trees, blessing every branch. There is something profoundly restful in just staring out the window. That afternoon, I realized this was a feeling I hadn’t had in a very long time but could remember from childhood—a feeling that arose when I was simply watching, trying to make sense of the world, the sun, the shadows, the trees.
What happens when we show up to life like this? What happens when we do not try to confirm a dentist appointment while at the same time ringing up at Walgreens? We discover that the cashier is grieving his father, too. What happens when we do not play Wordle while waiting in line at the bakery? The woman behind us reveals her sadness at her teenage daughter’s insistence that she can just “check the website” rather ask the real people in the bakery her question.
What actually happens when we close the laptop when we first hear the small feet pounding up the stairs? Not only do we give our child the gift of a hug instead a hello tossed over the top of screen – but we are also able to feel the excitement, the warmth in our animal bodies, our tails wagging, our joy mixed with poignance knowing that these footsteps will, in the blink of an eye, be gone from our home forever.
What a gift to ourselves, to live like this, if only so often. What a gift to our children, to let them experience life like this. And for all humans are creatures of imitation – what a gift for them to see us inhabit our own lives fully.
It is up to us to make this happen. But this kind of opening to our lives means not only experiencing the sublime god rays of winter sun, it means experiencing the tedium of boredom, the pangs of anxiety, the ache of loneliness – without immediately distracting ourselves with a screen. It also means rekindling – and I say this as an introvert – the lost art of conversation with strangers. Rekindling the lost art of spending time with family without everyone being in their own private world but rather watching the fog roll in together, listening, arguing, feeling, being.
This is my challenge to you all: to join me in pushing back on our devices. This doesn’t mean that we jettison them, though maybe it should. It might simply mean we put down our devices a bit more often , or we resist for just a few moments longer before we pick them up again. We have a meal with a friend, a partner, a child, without a phone on the table. There’s no limit to the ways we can experiment. There are many good things to try.
To support each other in this challenge is to answer a yearning of the heart for more joy and connection in our lives.
Let us help one another as we carve them out, these moments of emptiness, moments of wonder, moments of awe, these moments when we let the life flood in.
Thank you.