My son is loving overnight camp — so the app says. Its facial recognition software is scarily good, so the tagged photos, including his head in the back of a crowd, go straight to the front of the photo queue. There he is, my mop-haired, blue-eyed boy, smiling and happy. But my phone doesn’t ping with each arriving snapshot. I’m not compulsively checking to see if new pics have dropped since the last time I checked, oh, a few minutes ago. Don’t tell anyone… but I didn’t download the camp app on my phone this year.
To see photos, I have to get out my laptop and sift through hundreds of untagged photos of the whole camp, or sneak a peek at my husband’s phone after dinner. He’s got the app.
My son’s camp is “unplugged,” which means his phone is hanging out at home for four weeks. If he’d snuck it in his duffle bag on the sly, he would have been given amnesty on Day 1 to turn it over to camp staff, or risk getting sent home with no tuition refund. Ouch. The rules are strict, and the consequences clear. This is what it takes for kids to separate from their phones.
What does it take for me, as a parent, to separate from my phone? Or at least reduce my attachment to this enticing time-suck of a device? If not threats, then how about the same challenge to unplug, camp-style, as much as I can, while still holding down work, life and home fronts.
So far, it means reading on the subway instead of scrolling Facebook (yes, a book about school admission mania, so I’m still a mom looking out for her kid, if not his mug on the app). It means cleaning out random drawers at home, taking time to fix a broken frame and hang new art to reflect who we are now, as a family. It means taking in the world around me, and seeing beyond my screen, much like I hope my son is doing lakeside, lost in the beauty of 460 wooded acres with his camp crew.
When I stopped for a weekend coffee with my husband, after exploring the less scenic wooded vistas of Brooklyn, I noticed the cat in the window across the street, leaping and twirling (chasing a fly?) like a beautifully choreographed dance performance. It made the perfect tale to share in the next camp letter to my feline-obsessed child, who’s probably missing the cute cats from his pet care business.
When I climbed out of the subway on the way home, my gaze landed not on a phone in my hands, but a scar on my arm. Years ago, my son nicknamed the jagged outline and its “legs” as my “dog” (we have no pets), and he’d occasionally check in to see how my dog was doing, in the same sweet way he cares about his loved ones. It’s a silly family joke, one of many that happen in real life, and less so on screen. I’d like to think that my son sees me for who I am, scar and all, rather than a zombie tethered to a device that cuts into quality time.
And I hope to see my child for who he is, still growing and learning, fully engaging with camp life by challenging himself to new skills and new friends beyond his circles at home. Maybe he’s finding a way to better explore his Jewish identity, too, bonding with peers at Shabbat morning services near the lake, and far from his parents. And most importantly, far far away from his phone. That’s what makes it all possible.
We learned this the hard way, two years ago, at another overnight camp. Due to unfortunate circumstances including a leadership change and COVID outbreak, my son had access to his phone. An unhappy, pleading call home at midnight from the illicit phone goes down in history as one of my harder parenting moments. A year later, on the ride home from the new “unplugged” camp, he marveled at how great it felt to have left his phone behind. I held my tongue, and signed him up for another summer.
This year, we’re both taking a screen time break, in our own ways. It’s been a week already, and my phone says my screen usage has dropped 85 percent. So far, so good. But I have a confession to make. The real reason I don’t have the camp app installed is because my phone is full. Too many other apps, emails and photos are taking up precious real estate. That’s how this whole experiment began.
It’s time for a new phone, I know, and yes, more storage space. But I plan to keep the camp-style vibe of unplugged life going strong, for as long as I can. While my son is deep into his familiar camp traditions, like the Shabbat afternoon walk by the lake, and the hike to the summit of those wooded acres, I’m grateful to experience a bit of the camp magic myself, even if my new tradition was an accidental find.
