In Winthrop Square, in Brookline, Mass., a man sits on a park bench alone. The slight heat from the sun has coaxed people out of their homes and to their local park. Park goers sit together and have the occasional chat, but many find their hands compelled to their pockets to grab their devices. They tilt their necks down, settling into the natural bend that’s beginning to form at the tops of their spines. Their eyes comfortably glaze over as they swipe their thumbs against the glass of their phones.

Parks, libraries, malls - third spaces like these are vital to any community. They’re where people can affirm themselves and find empathy for identities different from their own, according to a report from the University of Chicago. Third spaces remind us that we thrive in community and suffer in isolation.

The man, Jeremy Irons, wears light blue jeans and has his hair tied up in a ponytail. He is the odd man out, the one person in the entire park who sits alone, but he is engaged in the most animated conversation. He has jerry-rigged his phone to sit in front of his face, thanks to a tripod that connects to the seat of the bench. Irons has positioned his phone to sit in front of his face, so he can sit on a FaceTime call and remain hands-free.

“I was talking to my mom,” he said. “I wanted to leave the house today but didn’t want to miss our weekly phone call, so I did it out here.”

There’s a dark green jungle gym at the far end of Winthrop Square. The laughter and chatter of children carry over the entire park. It is quiet, peaceful even. Parks like these seem to live in a pocket dimension, where time stands still. Parks are a place to go to pass the time, but on the Internet, kids can access an entire multiverse of these pocket dimensions. They are coaxed into an infinite number of virtual worlds where possibilities seem to be endless. But, while kids are jumping from platform to platform, their parents are still waiting for their digital skillset to dial up.

“It’s very challenging to keep up with,” Sharon Imber, a mom to an 8-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter, said. “I think that once you have to put your brain back online in a different way, that process can be painful.”

Imber casts the occasional glance towards the park and contemplates her next few words.

“Sometimes I’ll literally say to my son, ‘I can just see your brain cells wasting away,” “‘Let’s find something better to watch.’”

When the world closed in 2020, young people gravitated towards the digital world to find community and connection. Now, the kids are back, but where have they gone? 95% of kids have access to a smartphone, and 45% of them are online on a near constant basis, according to a report entitled The Kids Are Alright. The digital world is the new ‘it’ space for kids to gather.

During the pandemic, Imber’s daughter connected with her friends in online book clubs and virtual playdates with their American Girl dolls. Her teacher would assign online math games, and kids would get together on phone calls and play together.

“I didn’t love that they were on screen so much, but I felt like whatever method I could get her to talk to people I wanted her to do.” Imber said.

 Imber applauds the creativity of teachers and parents. Paper box pinatas, party games and puppet lessons in Spanish; adults came up with innovative solutions to engage kids in the online world.

“At the beginning it was so new and different that everybody was ok with it,” said Sharon. “I think as time went on, they got tired of doing it. It’s just not the same.”

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Terri Mahon has been an elementary school teacher on the East Coast for 25 years. She’s witnessed the direct impact that a great education can have on her students. To see them mature, whether it be in their reading or writing, motivates Mahon to pay extra attention to her students to see them succeed.

“Kids are looking up to you for a variety of needs,” said Mahon. “Not just the academic, but the social and emotional pieces that go into it as well.”

Since coming back from the pandemic, she’s had to integrate new and innovative technologies keep up with their students. She’s incorporated dozens of new online platforms into her curriculum, from reading exercises to math games to online libraries. Mahon has had to become an expert in all these platforms before instructing her own students on how to utilize them.

                  “They’re a lot younger than me, and technology is everywhere. They need to learn how to function through it, and they do it quite well,” she said. “They’re really tech savvy, and they’re capable.”

                  According to Mahon, her fourth and fifth grade students are well-versed in the graphic design platform Canva and can whip up websites in a flash. But, since the pandemic, Mahon has noticed that kids no longer have the attention span they used to. She notices that when working on their laptop, kids tend to have multiple tabs open getting easily distracted online. They’ve had to moderate the school-sponsored laptops with a site-blocking software.

                  “Sometimes they get a little bored,” Mahon said.

                  Imber has noticed this too. During the pandemic, Imber noticed her son began to mentally check out of his online math lessons, not putting in the same effort that she expected. Instead, she found him mesmerized by his older sister’s math classes.

                  “He loves science and math, and the schools can’t seem to satisfy his hunger for that information,” she said.

                  So, her son gravitates towards YouTube, a video sharing platform that has a wide range of educational and entertaining content (and sometimes, both). Imber’s son loves watching YouTubers conduct experiments and explore physics principles. She’s more than happy to allow him a little extra screentime as long as he’s engaging in this kind of educational content.

                  “He was starved for any kind of entertainment back then,” she said. “It got my son into things he would not have probably seen.”

 

Emily Stevenson is a babysitter for a family of four in Brookline. She walks their two kids home from school every day, feed them a quick snack and occupies their time until their parents relieve her from her duties.

One distinct detail about this family? Their parents only allow for one hour of screen time a week.

“The main thing they do is imaginative play,” Stevenson said.

Her kids gravitate towards the classic game of Imagination. They create fictitious worlds in their heads and play them out in real time, instructing Stevenson on what to do and who to play.

“It’s definitely something they will initiate,” said Stevenson. “They will ask me to build different things and then I would figure out a way to create it for them.”

Stevenson will help her kids create crafts like robots out of cardboard and incorporate them into their play. She’s also noticed that the older boy has developed an affinity to the popular Mario games, courtesy of Nintendo. He will often initiate imaginative play within the Mario universe, creating his own unique storylines based off characters and settings that he is familiar with. Stevenson has noticed that this approach to devices mirrored the way she grew up around technology.

“It wasn’t like we were sat in front of an iPad the whole day,” she said. “I kind of like that way of allowing kids to grow up, to be within their own mind instead of within technology.”

Stevenson’s employers prove that an alternative does exist. That it is possible to raise children in the modern world with limited access to devices, because they’ll find a way to fill their time with something else. But they will always gravitate towards what they know. Despite all of Stevenson’s best efforts to keep her kids away from their screens, her kids will still gravitate towards those virtual environments, like Mario, and bring them into the real world. A paradox ensues, in which the online world blends in with the IRL one, so much so that the lines start to blur. As a result it grows harder to decipher where original creativity ends, and the inspiration from these virtual worlds begin.

 

Recently, Imber started babysitting a young girl from the neighborhood. She is a year younger than her son but had some things in common. They were sitting on the couch in their living room when Imber’s teenage daughter walked over. She handed them her iPad and told them to play Minecraft.

                  Neither of them had ever seen the game before and had no idea what to do. But Imber watched as the two young children explored the game together, working collaboratively to learn how to play. Imber had initially set up art projects for them, but in the end, the two kids found the screens more entertaining.

                  Minecraft refers to itself as a “sandbox game,” according to its website. Users can use different kinds of blocks to create entirely fictious environments built entirely from the figments of their imaginations. The two young children were fascinated with this new expansive universe. Now, they play online any chance they get. Imber says that her son will pester her to call his friend’s mom to see if she can come online to play.

                  “I feel like if there’s actual connecting going on, we sometimes give them extra time,” Imber said. “When they play games together it feels a little bit more enriching to me than some other stuff.”

                  But Imber says that not all online connection is good connection. Her 13-year-old daughter is one of the few amongst her peers without her own personal cell phone, instead opting for an iPad to connect with her friends. There are grade-wide group chats where kids text at all hours of the night, spouting racist and derogatory language towards girls.

                  “I’m not sad that she is missing that at all,” Imber said. “I think she would have a hard time navigating all of that.”

                  Discord has replaced the chat rooms of the early aughts. An online space originally marketed towards gamers, Discord has transformed into a space where users can log on and engage in discourse on art, politics, video games and more. Servers act as a microcommunity, broken up into different channels.

                  Imber’s daughter uses Discord to play video games with her friends after school. She is the only girl amongst the group of boys.

                  “They were pretty open about not liking her,” Imber said. The boys would target her daughter with negative language and forced her into “serving” roles before kicking her off the channel completely.

                  Her daughter hasn’t rejoined the channel since. Imber recounts many conversations she had with her daughter about the Discord channel, like with the content being shared. Imber had questioned whether her daughter was actually having fun in that chat.

                  “She said I’d rather use my game time to draw, or play Minecraft,” Imber said.

                  Mahon was driving home from school one day when she passed by her local high school. The students had been let out early for the day and gathered on their school’s front yard. Mahon noticed that although they were physically together, the only thing that captured their attention were their devices.

                  “For me, it’s really crazy to see because I didn’t have any of that in high school,” Mahon said. “Phones have just really changed a lot, I think, and how we interact.”

                  But Mahon emphasizes that this doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

                  “It’s important for kids to understand the use of technology is something that can aid in their development, but they are still responsible for the content they’re looking up and sharing.”

                  It can be a lot on babysitters, teachers and parents alike to keep up with all this new technology. This platform fatigue is exhausting for parents, who are learning all this for the first time too.

                  Imber belongs to the PTA at her kids’ school, where administration will share a regular email newsletter outlining best practices and updates in the social media space. She will also reference resources like Common Sense Media, which feature opinions on children’s games and TV shows from an expert’s perspective.

                  “It’s just a lot of back and forth and paying attention, looking at what they see or what they spend their time on,” Imber said.

                  Her most important resource are other parents. It’s a popular topic of conversation amongst her friends, who share tips and hacks on how to help minimize their kids screen times, like time restrictions on social media apps.

 “When I was growing up there was lots of stuff that wasn’t great out there, but it didn’t seem like much to manage,” Imber said. “Sometimes my mom will marvel at how complicated things are now compared to when I was growing up.”