Office Hours: On the Importance of Balance

“Technology is bad.”

“The smartphone is harming young people.”

“Social media is the cause of today’s mental health crisis.”

We’re constantly reading and hearing these types of headlines which, for many of us, create a sense of fear, frustration, and defeat.

But then I think back to 2020. It was spring break, and the students were told not to come back to campus until we could figure out next steps. The problem? No one had any clue what the next steps should look like.What followed was a surreal couple of months, where, around the country, college administrators focused on closing residence halls and faculty prepared to teach classes virtually.

In the spring of 2020, I vividly remember Facetiming students while navigating their empty residence halls in an effort to identify and ship them their essential items—computers, books, personal belongings.

“I need my chemistry lab reports,” they’d say, directing me to some bookshelf and I'd use my iPhone to confirm I was rifling in the right places. Little did we know that it would be months until the students returned to those halls—belongings in tow.

Then it was time to learn about remote teaching. Many of us had previously used Zoom or Skype, but frankly, breakout rooms and virtual backgrounds and screen sharing was all pretty new to us dinosaurs. But, we did what we needed to do for our students.

This “pandemic gap time” was hard and many times, not pleasant. But we did it with the help of technology. It may not have been ideal but it was in many ways, a life saver, for the teachers who wanted to teach and the students who deserved to learn.

In that surreality, there was little evil to say about technology that allowed us to return kids’ beloved stuffed animals or helped them graduate on time.

There’s no denying the studies that say our dependence on technology is having deleterious effects—especially on our children. But as someone who’s devoted her life to helping children grow, I say it’s just like with everything else—it takes a little balance.

BALANCE—another word we hear all the time:

Work/life balance; a balanced diet; balancing exercises; balancing our budget (I still balance my checkbook). It seems that balance is generally a good thing that we should aspire to achieve in many aspects of our lives. So why wouldn’t we apply this principle to technology as well, for us and for our children. Of course it’s important to find time to read and play and talk and personally connect, without using technology.

But there are so many examples of technology being good—being enormously helpful, like during the pandemic. But when it dominates our lives—our children’s lives— it can be a problem.

Just because too much broccoli can cause problems to our thyroid and too many apples means spikes in our sugar levels, doesn’t mean we stop eating fruits and veggies. Technology is no different.

Those headlines don’t tell the complete story and we have to figure out, for ourselves, what balance of technology can keep the doctor away.