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What we discovered when our daughter unplugged for a school year

2024-03-31 00:00:00.0 海峡时报-新加坡原网页

SYDNEY – The handwritten letters from our 13-year-old daughter sit on our coffee table in a clear plastic folder.

With their drawings of pink flowers and long paragraphs marked with underlined and crossed-out words, they are an abridged, analogue version of her spirited personality – and a way for my wife, Diana, and me to keep her close as we watch TV and fiddle with our mobile phones.

They would not exist, of course, if Amelia were home with us in Sydney. But she is hundreds of kilometres away at a uniquely Australian school in the bush, where she is spending her whole ninth-grade school year without the Internet, a phone, a computer or even a camera with a screen.

Our friends and relatives in the United States can hardly believe this is even a possibility. There, it is considered bold just to talk about taking smartphones from students during class time.

Here in Australia, a growing number of respected schools lock up smart everything for months. They make tap-and-swipe teens learn, play and communicate only through real-life interaction or words scrawled on the page.

“What a gift this is,” we told Amelia, when she was accepted, hesitated, then decided to go.

What I underestimated was how hard it would be for us at home. Removing the liveliest member of our family, without calls or texts, felt like someone had taken one of my internal organs across state lines without telling me how to heal.

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Yet, as we adjust, her correspondence and ours – traveling hundreds of kilometres, as if from one era to another – are teaching us all more than we had imagined. The gift of digital detox that we thought Australia was giving our daughter has also become a revelatory bequest for us – her American parents and her older brother.

Something in the act of writing, sending and waiting days or weeks for a reply, and in the physical and social challenges experienced by our daughter at a distance, is changing all of our personal operating systems. Without the ever-present immediacy of digital connection, even just temporarily, can a family be rewired?

Amelia is at Timbertop, the ninth-grade campus of Geelong Grammar, one of Australia’s oldest private schools, which has made outdoor education a priority since the 1950s.

The idea was to build courage, curiosity and compassion among adolescents, and their ranks have ranged from the children of sheep farmers and diplomats, as well as Britain’s King Charles III. He spent a semester at Timbertop in 1966 and later said it was “by far the best part” of his education.

The year is meant to be difficult.

Before we dropped Amelia off in late January, we received a video from Timbertop showing teachers sitting at picnic tables in the sun, warning that confidence and personal growth would come only with struggles and perseverance.

Within 24 hours, we started to understand what that meant. Not for Amelia. For me and Diana.

A few days in, I also could not avoid tough questions about myself. Was the fact that it was so hard to lose contact a comment on my over-involved parenting? My own ridiculous addiction to tech-fuelled immediacy? Or both?