Haven Blog

I am a technologist. I enjoy the things that computers and digital devices can do–they often seem magical and amazing! As a technologist, I have a particular vantage point to see and be very uncomfortable with what companies are doing with that technology. There are catchphrases for these patterns: AdTech, Surveillance Capitalism, Rage Bait, Engagement-Optimized Feeds, Harvesting Eyeballs.

I am also a parent. As a parent, I am scared about the prospect of letting my kids loose in a digital world so aggressively dominated by these companies and patterns. But at the same time, technology was an enriching part of my childhood and continues to be an enriching part of my life and I want to share that with them. In this post, I don’t want to spend much time discussing the ways that bad tech patterns are bad, instead I want to share some of the ways I have held on to the enriching parts of technology to share them with my kids. For many of these choices, it turns out that (surprise!) my favorite solutions involve looking back in time a couple decades.

Physical media

I’m starting to fall in love with CDs again. When I was young, music came on CDs. This was a time before MP3s and before Spotify. This was a time when going to summer camp, I would pick which half-dozen CDs I wanted to bring with on the trip. This was a time of wired ear-bud headphones, sitting in school sharing a song with someone by giving them one of the two ear buds and listening side-by-side. This was a time of [Parental Advisory] labels on CDs that had objectionable language. This was a time of tiny LCD screens on portable CD players that only displayed the track number, so I sometimes knew my favorite song on a CD by number instead of by name.

I bought a mini CD boom box for the house. My oldest loves bringing it around to different rooms, plugging it in, and putting in a CD. I bought her the K-Pop Demon Hunters CD for her birthday. The local public library has CDs! CDs are awesome.

Speaking of the public library, they also have DVDs and BluRays. I remember the whole ritual of going to Blockbuster Video with my Dad to pick out a movie for family movie night. Usually he would let my sister and me pick out a few extras that we wanted to watch. That’s how I got familiar with the Three Stooges, even though it was before my time. The magic of having something to hold onto that you can bring home and put in the player next to the TV, and there is your movie!

As a parent one of the big wins with physical media is I know exactly what my kids have available to experience. If they aren’t ready for something, it doesn’t come home with us. The kids can be much more independent about watching and listening because there is no adversary inside the device they are using. Kids love that independence.

Landline Telephones

I hooked up a wired, physical telephone next to the kitchen in our house. I’m using a cheap VoIP provider with an analogue telephone adapter, but there’s a company called Tin Can that makes this really easy (no affiliation). The telephone network has retained backward compatibility as everyone moved to smartphones, so grandparents, neighbors, aunts and uncles, are all now accessible to the kids. Even better, these digitally-managed phones have excellent configuration options. I’ve whitelisted all the friends and family who get to call us, and the phone automatically blocks calls from dinner time to morning. My kids will spontaneously call up their grandparents to ask if they can go over to play, and have memorized my phone number because they like to prank call me when I’m also in the kitchen.

When I was a kid, the telephone was my bridge to friends and setting up my own playdates. It was “do you want to come over to my house?” instead of “Dad! Can you set up a playdate with so-and-so?” There is still a bit of a network effect until other families get hooked up with their own house phones, but I’m really excited about it. Kids really love that independence.

The Family Computer

I remember having friends over and going to friends’ houses and one of our favorite things to do was play computer games. This was the era of Commander Keen, and Prince of Persia. We would sit at the family computer, side-by-side, taking turns, discussing strategy. I definitely have games I want to share with my kids, but the internet is also not something I trust. I bought a used tower PC from Ebay and set it up next to the kitchen. Each kid has their own login and their own games or activities they like to explore. I also set up a pi-hole for our home network and configured the family computer to use the pi-hole for DNS. Just like the phone, I’ve whitelisted every domain that they can visit. For example: they get access to Wikipedia, but not Google. They get access to Minecraft, but we don’t play on public servers. No Youtube or Spotify, but I’ve curated some sites about how to solve a Rubik’s cube, or different ways to tie your shoes.

I showed my older kid that she could rip a CD onto the computer, and listen to it there. For now she’s just excited that she has yet another place she can listen to her favorite K-Pop Demon Hunters song, but maybe this is the start of building up her own music collection as I’ve done over the decades. Kids love being able to use a computer on their own!

I opened by calling myself a technologist. I recognize that a lot of the tools I’ve described above aren’t as accessible to less-technical parents, but the core philosophy is definitely still accessible. The dystopian parts of modern technology came to dominate because they are very convenient–but that convenience comes at a cost. Especially when kids are involved, it can be really rewarding to refuse paying that cost and sometimes even look to the past for inspiration.